Competitions to promote your blog

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

I see Darren has just tied up the running of a “group writing project“, titled “If I had to start my blog again” where he has asked readers to write in their blog what they would do differently if they were starting their blog again from scratch.

Darren seems to be a top bloke, and the motivations for this project are obviously quite altruistic (You get a link from Darrens blog at ProBlogger - worth its weight in gold!), it’s actually a very clever marketing ploy for his blog. Whilst not all the participating bloggers have linked back to ProBlogger, most of them seem to. Let’s say three quarters of them linked back to him, that’s sixty backlinks, and it hasn’t cost him a cent!

Jeremy at Shoemoney’s actually taken a slightly different tack with his competition, he’s asked people to nominate the most helpful blog, and is actually offering prizes, not for the people nominating, but for the owners of the most helpful blogs. I’m not sure how this actually benefits Shoemoney, other than the buzz he’ll get for giving away some pretty good prizes. ($US1,150 in prizes all up!). The only criticism I would have here is that someone like Darren at Problogger or one of the other  “big guys” who are already making decent money from their online efforts will probably walk away with most of the cash.

All in all I think that these are both excellent ways for these guys to promote their blogs. Although they’ve taken different routes, they’re headed in the same direction - create the buzz, get the backlinks, increase the traffic, make the moolah!

This has got me thinking about a way to do something similar. Although I couldn’t get away with doing something like Darren, as I don’t have the readership he does, offering some prizes is something that I would certainly think about. I wonder which would be more beneficial in the long term - $100 spent on an AdWords campaign, or $100 given away as a prize for the person who makes the most interesting post in their blog about what they would do with the money.