Blog Contests ~ Hidden traffic gem you must not neglect!

Organizing blog contests on your blog is a powerful way to pull in huge traffic. From my experience, you get rewarded more than you put in. Despite the huge value in benefits, most bloggers are still not sure if it’s worth their time. My most recent contest has been doing quite fine bringing in quite impressive traffic. In this post, I discuss some of the things I did to push the contest high.

Not all blog contests you organize will experience immeasurable success though. Some will definitely be more successful than others. However, there are things to do to always be on the upward move. Here are some points to guide you as you plan your next contest:

Add cash to the prizes

This is incontestably one of the very strong points to shoot your blog contest through the roof. People love money.  It’s generally said the best way to give someone what he wants is to give money.  You may not know that what he really wants now is Commentluv Premium plugin so giving him a premium template may be of little or no value. What if you just send him $120 as prize for the blog contest he just won? That means he’s 100 very fulfilled. He can get Commentluv Premium and still save some money.

Oh yes! I see why cash prize contests are the hottest on the Internet today. Now just add cash prize to your next blog contest and see the how your readers go crazy.

Oh no! Enstine I don’t have $100 to give out!

Don’t worry! I’ll show you how to raise the money. Just read on.

Make participation very easy

Here is one thing that kicks me off so many contest pages. If you want me to like 20 fan pages and follow 20 Twitter accounts, etc, it won’t work for me. Most often, contest organizers want to bundle everything in a single contest. That makes the task heavy and keeps many participants away.

Keep it simple to encourage more participation. Of course what you want is get as many contestants as possible so it will be totally senseless to make things hard for them.

Use the right tools to power your blog contest

There are many tools out there to help you run your contests. Some paid and other free. Which ever is your choice, you’ll have to be wise and make sure you get the facilities you want. Most commonly used free tools are RaffleCopter and PunchTab.

While I have used both of them, I like Punchtab for its facility that rewards hard work. Each PunchTab contest participant is generated a unique referral url. The more they pull traffic to these unique URLs, the more points they earn, standing a better chance to win. This will encourage participants to drive more traffic to your contest page through their referral url as they fight to earn more points and win the contest.

Promote your blog contests

If you care about your contest, then you have to do some promotion. I know, like any other blog post, you are going to share on social media, mail to your list, talk to your friends about it, etc. But there is much you should do to take your blog contests to greater heights. Here are some suggested dedicated platforms for contests promotions:

• cWinners.com
• Emperola.com
• ContestChest.com

I know there are a couple of others. You can add to this list in the comment box

How to raise money for cash prizes.

In my most recent blog contests, I contacted a few friends to sponsor with cash. Surprisingly, it came in so easy.  I got more than enough guys who showed up to sponsor.  So I had to split them into two blog contests.

Listen, in blogging, there are many cool guys that are ready to join hands to succeed. Just talk to your friends and you’ll see them jumping on board.

NB: Avoid too many sponsors on a single blog contest. In trying to reward them, you are going to make participation difficult. If you have 10 sponsors, each having a Fanpage and Twitter account, that will mean 20 PunchTab tasks already. That’s way too high for an average participant. If you have many sponsors, split them into several blog contests

Have you ever organised a blog contest? What were your successes? Let me hear your thoughts in the comment box and thanks for sharing this post with your friends.