Organizing a successful blog contest

A successful Contest can boost your blog traffic. People love to win free stuff. Here I will discuss some steps that I find necessary for good results from a contest. Remember Contest is an invesment of time and money so make it as effective as an advertisement campaign. Feel free to add your ideas in comments below.

Set Goal

This is very important in my opinion. You need to know what you want to achieve from this contest. Your reasons and expectations for organising this contest should be clear at first point. Do you want to increase number of subscribers? do you want to spread words about your blog? do you want more links back to your blog? So make sure you set your goal(S).

Prize selection

Prize selection depends on your goals that you want to achieve from this contest. For instance, if you want to get a back link from another blog in your niche, Nobody will talk about this contest in their post if you are just offering an advertisement spot for a month (Unless your blog gets reasonable good traffic). For a new blog i will suggest you spend good money for contest. Giving away something which will attract your visitors will help.

When to launch? How to launch?

You better know your blog and your visitors. Launch the contest on the day of week when you get more traffic. I get more traffic at start of week (on Mondays and Tuesdays) on my sites which is good in weekdays and then gets low on weekends. So I will launch the contest on Monday so that i have whole week to promote it.
secondly, Launch the contest in a well written post explaining everything clearly. Make sure to design good graphic(s) for contest. Show prizes and write some catchy words in the graphic, also give brief contest information in the image so if someone only shares or looks at image, they should know most of the things about the contest and what you are offering.

Entry Methods

I will suggest to have different entry methods for contest. Link back, subscription, a post linking back to the contest post and talking about it, a simple reply in the contest post, ask readers to download an e-book etc are some methods that you may want to use. Make sure you give different values to people who are using different methods for participation. You can give a single entry to some one who is simply replying to the post to enter in the competition, five entries for link back and 8 entries for a blog post about the contest. It depends on you how you model the contest but make sure you give more chances to people who are spreading words about contest to win it.

Duration of the contest

The length of contest should not be too long OR too short in my opinion. People like to participate in competitions if you are announcing winner in a week or so. Do not select a very short term either. You should have enough time to promote the contest and also allow enough time for readers to talk about it. Make sure you have clear planning of all days during competition. Ask readers to participate in competition in daily posts but don not let the contest dominate your blog during this duration. The idea is to write killer content to get more subscribers and daily visitors. I will allow 10 to 15 days for the contest (I think I can generate enough buzz of competition in two weeks).

Promote the contest

Let everybody know that you are having a contest on your blog. Use all resources available to promote it. I will suggest forums, social bookmaking, comments on other blogs, Submit to blog contests blogs, advertise (if you have money to promote contest). Here is a list of blogs that are helpful for promoting blogs.
- Contest Blogger
- Laura William
- Contest Beat
- My Blog Contest
- The Prize Blog
- Auto Blog Contest
- Review wow
- Blog Contests
- Link and Earn
- Blogging Contest
- My Blog Contests
- The Contest Winner
- Contest Blog Cat
- Contest
- Prize Atron
- Contest Time
- Submit Your Contest
- Blogodise
- Media Mafia
- Blogetition

Announce the winner and analyse the results

Announce the winner,link back to their blog (It shows your contest was genuine). People will definitely come on your blog to read this post to find out who is winner. This is best time to talk about some future posts and topics that you are planning to cover in upcoming week ask users to come back for more great content.
Analyse the results. See if you have achieved the goals that you set at the beginning. Note down any mistakes you made at any level (announcement, promotion etc) and take care about those things in future contests.