Blog Contests Build Blog Traffic

Here's a quickie post about Blog Contests, which offer some of the best opportunities to jump-start traffic for your blog. I ran a Blog Contest at South Side Star with mixed success.

My contest's goal was to increase subscribers to South Side Star. My blog welcomed visitors to get my updates via feed reader or email, and four of those people would win a prize. To participate you to 1) subscribe to my blog and 2) email me your choice of prize from among the CD and DVD prizes I offered as an Amazon affiliate.

The contest definitely drove traffic to my blog. People came in very impressive numbers because I'd left personalized contest invitations on various "friends" sites at MyBlogLog. (See MyBlogLog widget in the Widget Gallery at bottom of Sidebar.) I made a point of visiting each person's blog and leaving a brief, personalized comment in their MyBlogLog message box.

I only got a few subscribers -- six to be exact. Which I suppose was not so bad. What was really interesting, though, was that none of the subscribers emailed me their prize choice! So I wasn't able to identify or award the prize winners.

My key learnings from this little experiment:

~MyBlogLog is an excellent community. (Mostly) sensible people of all ages from all walks of life. Supportive, they are. And friendly. They are one huge group of bloggers who're motivated to surf member sites and help enliven your blog!

~ MyBlogLog drives traffic. This community exceeded my expectations in terms of number of visits who saw my message-invites and clicked to learn more about my contest.

~ A decent number of people seemed to value what I blog about -- politics and pop culture -- and took the time to subscribe. Some still return regularly, and I regularly visit their blogs as well.

~ Although I received a few compliments on the CD and DVD prizes I offered, not one person sent me the email I needed in order to know who they were and what prize they would choose.

I guess you can only ask so many steps. And I guess the bottom line result of exposure and traffic should suffice.

What would I do differently? I'd probably write and pay to post an actual press release at services such as PR Web.

Following are a few 'live' Blog Contests that you may want to check out soon:

~ Future of Search Marketing Blogging Contest

~ Blog Contest Site keeps a running blog of some the hot contests of the moment

~ John Chow dot Com's blog contest was hugely successful.