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.

 

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Posted by Ankesh Kothari under Traffic on 14 May 2007
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