Secrets Of Competitions Monday, October 20th Money Making

Competitions are a great way of bringing new readers / commentators to your blog. At the minute, Clog Money is holding a great competition where you can declare your love to him via a comment, and you will be entered to win a flip video camera. Pretty cool no? And Danny over at linkers blog is currently offering his new product about blog commentating to people who subscribe to his blog – which is worthwhile anyway, let alone the fact that you’ll get some quality information potentially for free!

Now there is a clear distinction between the two types of competitions. They are both offering brilliant prizes, but the goals seem to be different. Clog has gone for a pretty ‘unique’ competition scheme, having people declare their love for him makes it a pretty interesting (and funny) game. Hopefully people will remember his site because of it, but sadly they might not return (albeit they should). Dannys’ competition – albeit not unique in style necessarily – will however bring more people back, as subscribing to his blog gives you an entry into the competition. This means that while the competition is running, the people who have signed up just for the prize will receive regular updates from his blog, and it will increase his reader count! Most of these people will probably keep receiving the emails as well after the competition has finished, be it that they are too lazy to unsubscribe, or that they actually enjoy the posts (obviously the latter being the case!).

Now this isnt to say one style is better than the other, but offering an entry for a subscription has the potential to make your reach grow – especially if you know how to advertise it well. Now Danny is offering a blog commenting blueprint, which is unique, but is limited to a particular niche – namely the blogging niche. Therefore most of the people he may target will be people with blogs. Yet Clogs’ prize has a lot more reach in my opinion – as there are a LOT of people who would like a camera for free! With the right advertising, he could bring thousands of people to his site, all for no cost, and without having to post on hundreds of blogs / forums.

See, what I noticed a while ago when I started out, were a lot of blogs were talking about competitions, how they were brilliant to bring in more readers etc. and I agreed with them! However they seemed to all be missing out on one potential advertising spot that seemed almost obvious to me – competition websites. If you were to submit to a competition website that you were giving a free camera away, as Clog is so doing, sites like this would be fantastic to hit. They regularly send out newsletters with the latest competitions on to thousands of people around the world. Such a site (for those wanting one) is Uk Competitions (please note, I never include any affiliate links in my posts, and I’m not ‘trying’ to plug other sites - I only state this as I have been linking to a lot of things recently without realising!). I myself had planned to run a competition to offer a camera or something similar (gadgets are always the best way to go I feel) and advertise it on these sites, saying that subscribing to my blog would count as an entry. People are surprisingly happy enough to give their email for something that could be free – so long as you state that you won’t be giving it out for anything else! Unfortunately I didn’t raise enough money to hold the competition to test out my findings, but I thought I would post this in order to help those of you who are thinking about doing competitions, or even those of you who are currently running them.

I hope Danny and Clog Money don’t mind me using them as examples in this post (if you do guys, give me a heads up), but the opportunity to explain about competitions with two good blogs doing different things was too good to miss! Hope its been of some use! Congratulations if you actually made it to the end of this long post! I highly recommend looking into this area of advertising, as I hadn’t seen anyone talking about it – who knows, maybe people knew but just didnt want to ’spill the beans’

Dan