BinaryDay – A little better day

Blogging contests are in Fashion. Done right it can get a significant boost to the popularity of your Blog. There are many theories about how to get it right. However the best way to learn something is to watch a master of the craft execute the theory with absolute perfection.

I have not seen any blogger execute a blogging contest with better effect than Ajith on SEO Challenge ‘09. However I am not writing this blog post to praise Ajith. The aim of this post is to see what we can learn from the success of the contest and how we can replicate the success ourselves. The following are some interesting success factors that I could observe.

1. Detailed planning before the start of the Contest

When you announe a competition with only 7 days to register, the only persons to signup are your existing, regular users. They have been already visiting your blog, so what do you stand to gain? So let the world know that you are going to hold a contest. Build up interest by giving some interesting details like 100$ cash prize. Get your readers involved. By asking for help in getting sponsors, Ajith had converted this competition from “his competition” into “his readers’ competition”.

2. Get as many contestants as possible:

This is one step that almost everyone gets right. However I am putting it in for the sake of completeness. Do not just announce the competition and sit back and wait for the contestants to pour in. Market it with all your might. Here is what Dollarshower did:

• Announced on his blog
• Got his blogger freinds to blog about it, twitter it etc. Unlike many other bloggers he did not force people to promote the post. That is a surefire way to make sure that really good bloggers will never write about your competition.
• Actively commented about it on other blogs. That is how I got to know about it in the first place.

3. Get the attention of your target audience and engage them over a period of time

Before you go ahead with a blogging contest, ask yourself a simple question. What do I want to gain by the end of the contest. I am assuming that you want to get more exposure and traffic for your blog. However don’t aim for traffic alone. Aim to get users who will stay with your blog, long after the contest is over.

This is one aspect of the contest that keeps impressing me over and over. If you go through DollarShower, you will realize that it is a blog for bloggers who are just starting out. So he chose a topic that many bloggers are proud of and many people struggle with i.e SEO. Unlike all available blogs, he was not talking about theory. This contest is about getting results by putting that theory into action. By the time you finish this post, you will realize the brilliance of it.

The contest was not a one time action. It is spread across 6 weeks. So contestants have to visit his blog for 6 weeks, giving him better chance of pitching ideas to them.

4. It Generated healthy and passionate discussion

SEO by its very nature tends to generate a lot of argument. This was no different. There has been lot of discussion about what is the right way to measure SEO success. While % increase in traffic is the obvious metric, it has created a lot of discussion by keeping Nihar, who has got the maximum increase in search engine traffic, out of the top five. Looks like the deciding criteria might have designed to give an advantage to new bloggers, the target audience for DollarShower.

5. It set up the proof that SEO works.

Ajith is putting together a series of really good SEO articles. What better way to show to his readers that SEO works than proof of 700% increase in traffic over 1 month!!! Moreover the contest has created some great content for future as it has got bloggers to talk about SEO strategies that they used.

6. Finally it has established DollarShower as a blog with a difference and it will create a large number of links as well

I am sure winners will like to blog about their success and many professional SEOs would use the data as proof that SEO works.

These are my observations/ learnings. Please share your views in the comments section, so that we can have a comprehensive post about how to run a perfect blogging contest.