Blog Contest- Is It Worth Running One On Your Blog?

Now that my blog contest is over and winner has been announced, I am taking this opportunity to examine the benefits of running a Blog contest. Of course this article is based only on the limited experience I had with blog contest, and will come short of covering all possible aspects of running a blog contest.

When I crated the contest my goals where simple, encourage comments and links to that post, and at the end decide the winner of the contest, providing that a participant fulfilled the “requirements” or followed the rules of the contest.

Rules of The Contest.

The rules I have created were tied into the goals I tried to accomplish- to get more comments and links. The requirements for entering the contests were easy- comment or link to the post and you have a chance to win $200. I initially made a mistake to determine the winner by whoever leaves comment #100 wins the contest. It of course affected the excitement of participants and did not offer “equal” opportunity to win the contest. I believe it was Andy Beard who commented that he would seize an opportunity (when majority of my readers were asleep) to make sure he was the author of comment #100. Sorry Andy, even with the rules changed I received only 99 comments.

Deciding the winner in such a manner of course reflected on the level of participation, while I received first 40 comments during the first three days, comments decreased thereafter and by the time I adjusted the rules commenting on that post almost stopped. It is important that you come up with method to that will determine a winner that would be fair to all other participants.

Prize.

No matter what you will give away to the winner of the contest, the number of participants may depend on your prize. I gave away $200, but I wonder how many people read the post and said to themselves “Yea right! He is not going to give you that money {you can replace “money” with ipod, cellphone, teeshirt or whatever your prize is} !” I personally do not regret giving away $200- it was worthed every penny.

Now lets take a look on how did the contest work. Remember that according my goals all I wanted to accomplish is to have more comments and maybe a few links to the post announcing the contest.

Comments.

The number of comments reached 99 (this number includes trackbacks) on the contest post. Considering the average amount of comments my blog posts receive, I have done extremely well. I wish however I used more imagination establishing the contest’s rules and attempting to limit comments such as “Is this comment 100 yet?” or “I hope I win”. I did ask participants to tell me what would they do with $200- even though to every commentor followed through, I ended up not discriminating against the short comments I mentioned above. I think there is a way of running a contest that will be not only an opportunity to win, but will also contribute and enhance your blog. At the end the contest post became 3rd most visited entry (according to BumpZee) on my blog:

Links.

According to the trackbacks on my blog there were 11 links pointing to contest post. While Google blog search shows only 6 (not including trackbacks from my own blog) and Technorati showing 26 “reactions”/links to the contest post. The quality of most of these links is not that big, but I had some PR 3+ blogs pointing my way. Considering that big “G” tell us over and over again that only “editorial” links carry value and weight, at least one link to my post by the winner of the contest can be looked as a “paid link”. But one only can guess, right? However, if you were to search “$200 blog contest” on Google, my blog occupies first position even though for the wrong post.

Lastly I was asked by Josh, the author of Make Money Blog, if the contest brought more subscribers. It is really hard to say, but I doubt that the contest brought more than 10 subscribers. But I think it is something worth considering when implementing a blog contest.

Conclusion.

Blog contest can be of great benefit to you and your blog. They may bring more visitors, more comments and more links to your blog. They do however require a lot of your attention. Is it a good marketing strategy? It all depends of how you manage to implement the contest, but potential is there. Will I ever run another contest? I am not sure. But stay tuned just in case :).

I am sure there are much better articles out here to guide you if you were to run a blog contest. Still feel free to use this as guide of what to do what not to do when running a blog contest.