How To Win Attention & Draw Traffic

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From the desk of blogger John Wesley:

How To Use Contests To Increase Your Blog Traffic

Contests. They are the ultimate leverage tools to grow your traffic because:

Your costs will be lower and
your results better!

Why spend money on advertising if you can spend money on rewards and achieve better results?

The Harry-est Town in America Contest

The last Harry Potter book is due to be released on 21st July. It is bound to be a best seller and sell millions of copies once its released. There is no doubt about it. The fan base is so huge - that even if the book reads bad - people will buy it.

Amazon.com knows that 21st July is going to be a BIG day for them. But by selling the books before it is released, Amazon.com could save a lot of money on inventory and warehousing. Should they spend money on promoting the pre-order page for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?

Naa - there is a better alternative. A contest!

Here is what Amazon.com is doing. They came out with a contest. The town that pre-orders the highest number of the Harry Potter books before its release will win $5,000! The money will go to a charity that serves that town.

Because of the contest, many town councils and churches went to work and started asking people to pre-order the book from amazon.com

For the investment of $5000, amazon.com achieved something that has never been achieved before. They’ve pre-sold thousands of copies of the book. The Harry Potter book is already a best seller. And more than 2 months are left for its release!

Link: Amazon.com Contest Page

Blog Contest

Another cool contest case study is from the BloggingTips.com blog. They came up with an easy contest that their readers could participate in.

• All they have to do is add a link that says “win a mascot at BloggingTips.com”
• On May 26th, whoever has the top most link on Google for the phrase “win a mascot at BloggingTips.com” will win a reward.

BloggingTips.com has 3 rewards. Total value of the 3 rewards is $380. But the cost to BloggingTips.com to give away the rewards is estimated to be less than $100.

For the total cost of less than $100 - BloggingTips.com has got 31 blogs to link to them already (stats from technorati.com). And many people from those blogs have visited their website!

Success Formula for Contests

There are just 5 factors that lead to the success of contests. Work on them and you’ll generate a lot of traffic:

• How easy is it to enter the contest
• How fun is it to participate in the contest
• What rewards and incentives can be won
• How to generate the first few participants for the contest
• How easy is it to spread the word about the contest

Action Summary:

• Organize a contest to promote your blog. Give people a reward to perform an action.
• Action could be: linking to your blog from their blog or website. Or commenting on your blog. Or forwarding your blog to their friends.

Article Syndication FAQ

In the Top 5 Free Ways to a_?Starta_? Generating Traffic to Your Blog, one of the five ways is:

Convert your blog posts into articles and submit them to article directories.

After reading that post, a reader who calls himself stocktube asked a very good question.

“Does it still work? I read from somewhere that google might penalise or give lower weightage for duplicate contenta_?”

The question warrants an answer.

1. Google does not penalize duplicate content. It just hides it. If 2 websites have the same content, ita_Tll just show one of the websites in its search results.

2. When your blog is not so famous, Google won’t rank it high on the search results as it is.

3. But if you syndicate your post and add it to ezinearticles.com - your article has a good chance to show up on Google search (because ezinearticles.com is already highly ranked).

4. And that article on ezinearticles.com can drive traffic to your blog and making it more famous.

Action Summary:

• Convert your blog posts into articles and syndicate them when your blog is not so highly ranked on Google.

• Drop the technique over time when your site grows and more people start linking to it and its search engine rankings improve.

Saying No To Digg

The statistics are back. From May 2 to May 9. This blog saw 511 unique visitors. Out of 511 people - can you guess how many came from digg.com? A grand total of

“4″

Which leads me to remove the “Add to Digg” buttons from this blog. It just took a lot of space. And added to distraction.

Why Digg.com is Not a Good Idea

Digg.com is a great site for making your blog posts wildly famous… if your blog is already slightly famous. If you can get a 100 diggs from your own website traffic, then adding digg.com buttons makes sense. And they can help you go from 100 to 1000 diggs. But if you don’t have the ability or the pull to get those initial 100 diggs for your blog posts - digg is useless. Your blog posts will remain buried on their website.

Alternative Real Estate Usage

So what else can you show on your blogs instead of wasting the valuable real estate on digg buttons? The answer is…

Add Stumble Upon Buttons!

The Might of StumbleUpon.com

As I write this post - 2,315,617 people have installed stumbleupon.com toolbars on their computers. Whenever these people have free time, they click on the “stumble” button on their browser toolbars - and stumbleupon.com will take them to a random website based on what they like. These people can vote on whether they liked that website or not. And based on those ratings, stumbleupon.com shows them similar websites.

The twist is: the more people that give a positive vote to a particular website, the more stumbleupon users will get to see it.

By adding a “Stumble This” stumbleupon button to your blog posts - you allow your blog visitors to give your post a positive vote.

StumbleUpon Statistics

In the last one week - I voted positive for 3 of my blog posts through the stumbleupon.com browser. And a few people voted positive using the “share this” button on this blog - which already has a stumble this button on it. That seems to have created a stumbleupon.com whirlwindy roll over effect.

Out of the total 511 visitors - a whole 362 people came from stumbleupon.com!

(Statistics provided by Google Analytics.)

(This week, I’m going to test having stumbleupon button on this website along with the “share this” button.)

Action Summary:

• Add a stumbleupon.com button to your blog posts. Click for instructions.

The First 100k Users Are The Hardest

“Be a painkiller. Not a vitamin.” - Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg is one of the co-founders of the Wordpress script that uses this blog. I recently stumbled upon his audio and found it fantastic. You should listen to it. (Its educational as well as entertaining!)

Matt gives you his 13 points that will help you to grow from 1 user to 100,000 users!

Some of the things he talks about are:

• Being passionate
• Doing your own support
• Having metrics for everything you do
• Being a painkiller - not a vitamin

The first 100k users are always the hardest
(scroll down to listen to the audio online or download it to listen at your own convenience)

Top 5 Free Ways to “Start” Generating Traffic to Your Blog

1. Syndication.
Convert your blog posts into articles and submit them to article directories.

2. PR.
Write press releases and distribute them.

3. StumbleUpon.
Add a “stumbleupon” button to all your blog posts. When your readers click on the buttons, more people will start visiting your website through stumbleupon.com toolbars.

4. Hug another blogger.
Send them thank you notes. Comment on their blogs. (Read more…)

5. Co-Exchange Posts.
Contact a blogger and ask him to write a guest post for your blog and you can write a guest post for his.

(Written in response to Darren Rowse’s group writing project. Re-visit this blog frequently and you’ll find more blog traffic generating tips and tricks. And most of them will be more detailed and comprehensive.)

Hug a Blogger Today, Okay?

Index card taken from the files of the hugely talented Jessica Hagy (Hug somebody today!)

One of the easiest way to generate more traffic to your blog is by networking with other bloggers.

1. Send thank you notes to other bloggers in your industry
2. Comment on other blogs

Total time to send one thank you note and comment on one blog everyday is 10 minutes a day. But the response will be phenomenal.

• People will read comments on other blogs and come visit your blog
• The bloggers themselves will appreciate your commenting on their posts
• And most of them will visit your blog
• Many of them will link back to your posts and comment on your blog too
• A few of them will add you to their Blog Rolls
• Search engines may find your link on other blogs and improve your rankings

As you can see - the benefits are many. So are you going to be persistent and hug a new blogger everyday?
Tools:

• Technorati.com - for finding blogs in your industry
• Postful.com - for sending snail mail Thank You letters
• Sendoutcards.com - for sending snail mail Thank You postcards
• DomainTools.com - for finding out the snail mail address for the owners of a website

Mastering One Mountain

a_?The experienced mountain climber is not intimidated by a mountain — he is inspired by it. The persistent winner is not discouraged by a problem — he is challenged by it. Mountains are created to be conquered; adversities are designed to be defeated; problems are sent to be solved. It is better to master one mountain than a thousand foothills.a_?

- William Arthur Ward

Thank You for focusing on mastering one mountain than a thousand foothills.

Thank You for focusing your energies in creating one A-list blog than 5 ordinary mediocre ones.

(People who know me well enough will know that this is the hardest blog post I’ve made.)

Questions For James D. Brausch

• How do you structure your business so that you have to spend less time on it as it grows bigger?
• How do you motivate yourself to get (boring but important) things done?
• Do you have a routine?
• How do you set your goals and priorities?

(For those who are wondering, James came up with a creative idea of having a Q&A session on Time Management. Anyone can ask him questions and trackback to his blog. And he will answer them.)

Colour Palette Generator

Yesterday, I spent some time designing the logo and the layout for this blog.

(Right now, I’ve uploaded the blog.txt theme. But its only temporary because it doesn’t have everything I need.)

I spent a lot more time than I should on picking up colours. No colour combination was good enough. I spent a lot of time with orange and black - but decided against it - because black layout with black text leaves a lot less colour on the blog.

Finally, I found this awsome tool that solved my colour problems in 2 minutes.

• I went to Steven DeGraeve’s “Color Palette Generator” tool
• Added a vibrant nature picture to it that I found from Google
• And the tool picked out the colours for me from the nature picture!

Here are the two colours that I picked out: