How To Use Contests To Increase Your Blog Traffic

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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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