BinaryDay

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.

Everytime I face a problem, binaryday gets a rather useful post. The last time my USB got infected with virus, I had posted my experience about how to remove virus from usb. More than 500 people have found that to be useful since then. (Though not many people have visited my post about how to convert word into pdf, I will ignore that)

This weekend I had to go searching for a Nikon service center in Mumbai. While the addresses are present on Nikon India site, it could not be easily found. Hence I decided to put up the information on the blog.

Nikon Service Centers in Mumbai

Sattelite Silver Shop No.6&7.
Opposite National Garage, Marol Naka,
Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri (E),
Mumbai 400059, India
Phone: (91-022) 4092 5555
Fax: (91-022) 4092 5599 

Mazda Camera Centre (Mumbai)
306, Veena Killedar Industrial Estate,
Pais Street,
K.Khadye Marg Mumbai
400011, India
Phone: (91-022) 2307 9284
(91-022) 2307 9293
Fax: (91-022) 2308 9211 

Nikon Service Centers in Pune

Surana Service Center (Pune)
629/33, Raviwar Peth,
Below Muslim Bank,
Bhori Masjid Building,
Pune – 411002
Phone: 020 – 2447 5341
020-6416 6259
Email: nikonservicepune@gmail.com

Nikon Service Centers in Ahmedabad

New Electronic Centre (Ahmedabad)
Shop no 13-14, Shahjanand Trade Centre,
Opp Kothawala Flats, Preetam Nagar,
Near Paldi Cross Road,
Ahmedabad – 380006
Gujarat
Phone: 079-2657 9822
Email: newelectroniccentre@hotmail.com 

Nikon Service Centers in Delhi

Photo Vision (Delhi)
Address:
223, Okhla Industrial Estate Pharse III
Near Modi Flour Mill,
New Dehli 110020,India
Phone: (91-011) 2692 5999
Fax: (91-011) 2692 9857 

Nikon Service Centers in Gurgaon

Nikon India Private Limited.(Gurgaon)
Address:
Nikon India Pvt Ltd,
Plot No.17,Sector 32,
Institutional Area,
Gurgaon 122002, Haryana
Phone: +91-124 4688514
Fax: +91-124 4688527 

Nikon Service Center in Bangalore

Inter Foto India Pvt Ltd (Bangalore)
Address:
310,Kedia Arcade,
92,Infantry Road
Bangalore -560001
Phone: (91-080) 080 41132935
(91-080) 080 41132936
Fax: (91-080) 080 41132921
Email: service@interfotoindia.com 

Nikon Service Center in Chennai

Camera Service Centre (Chennai)
Location Map  Address:
No.5 Vijayashanthi Complex
Basement 3, Blackers Road
Anna Salai,
Chennai 600002,India
Phone: (91-044) 2859 4392
(91-044) 2841 3513
Fax: (91-044) 2852 4662
Email: cameraservicecentre@vsnl.net

Nikon Service Center in Hyderabad

Astro Camera Tech (Hyderabad)
Location Map  Address:
1st Floor, Above Bank of Baroda,
Beside Reddy Hostel,
Hotel Jaya International Lane,
Abdis, Hyderabad – 500001
Phone: 040-6646 0248
Email: nikon.act@gmail.com

SEO is a really complex concept. At least if you are planning seo forlong term success. However human mind has a tendency of simplifying things as much as possible. Probably that explains our obsession with the concept of pagerank. All that we have to keep moitoring a little green bar to know how successful our SEO efforts have been. I wish it was that simple, but unfortunately it is not.I shall not be worried, if such partial knowledge about SEO resulted in wastage of time alone. The problem is it puts your blog/website at the risk of being penalized.

For example take the case of link building. Backlinks are the single most important factor in deciding your ranking on Google. So everyone advises you about building links to your blog. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when someone makes you believe that building links as fast as possible will get you results fast.

If that is the only seo post that you read before you start getting links for your blog, you are in trouble. You need to learn about anchor text diversity, speed of link acquisition, problem with link exchange and circular link exchange, issue with domains on the same server, site-wide links issue etc. The question is are you ready to commit that much of time to understand so many concepts or do you want to go commenting on dofollow blogs?

BTW, if you happen to be an electronics engineer, I will like your views on my post about the difference between intel core2 duo and intel dual core processors.

Thanks to donace from thenexus for putting together this cool list of free seo tools.

Nihar has given a detailed instruction about how to add wordpress pages to navigation bar

Ajith at dollarshower has some greatly simplified articles about seo

Having a good product is necessary for a company to be successful. However will only a great product make a company successful? What happens if noone has ever heard of its products? So if you have a great product. People already know about the product and they are queueing up infront of stores to buy your products. Do you need to do anything else? Yes. Collect money from them. Without this last step, you will have a great charity, not a business.

It is so much easier to agree on the obvious when you are talking about something you are not involved. Now take the logic from the above paragraph and apply to what you are doing i.e blogging. The content that you are producing is the product. You need good content. But ONLY good content will take you nowhere. People need to know about your content. Think SEO/SMM. Finally you need to be able to collect money from them, which takes us to monetization.

Summary: To make a living blogging, you need to

1. Create great content
2. Promote the content so that people know about it.
3. Finally monetize the traffic so that eyeballs are converted into bank balance.

I shall be writing a number of post related to how to convert great content into bank balance in the next few posts. I hope you have already signed up for my feed already.

To understand the concept, read my earlier post about blogger’s dilemma

These SEO steps are so basic that you have already done these steps. However since they are so basic, you have no business not doing any of them.

1. http://yourblog.com redirects to http://www.yourblog.com or vice-versa.
2. Your permalink structure is /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/.
3. Your blog has a sitemap.
4. You have a google webmaster account and your sitemap has been submitted to it. Ideally you should submit to yahoo and msn as well.
5. Your post titles should not be blog name >> post title. It should be Post title at best. If you think your blog name is too cool then max you can do is use post title >> blog name
6. If you show an excerpt on your home page then you do not use a “read the complete post” as the link to the complete post.  You use “read more about keyword keyword” like this post should be linked from homepage as “read more about wordpress seo”
7. You link to your own posts with proper keywords
8. The link to your about-us, contact-us page is nofollowed.
9. Each post has atleast one image
10. each image has proper alt and title tag

What do you do when adsense fails to make sense of your website? My friend runs this blog about interesting advertisements. His posts are about advertisements of different products. His visitors are interested in the advertisements and not in the products. Obvious right? Not to Google It keeps on showing advertisements about the products. Noone is interested in them anyways. So noone clicks

What is the possible solution to this problem? Any ideas?

Nicholas Francis of pixobytes is conducting a Valentines Day contest on his blog. All that you need to do to enter the contest is suscribe to his RSS feed. The best thing about his contest is that he is giving away 100$ in cash prize even though there are no sponsors for his contest. Speaks a lot about the commitment of the young person to his blog. You have one fan Nicholas. 

White Horse from Fearless of Taylor Swift has been released

Taylor Swift’s music video promoting “White Horse” has been released. This is a song taken from her album Fearless. It is directed by Trey Fanjoy.

The Background story of the White Horse

According to Taylor Swift, the white horse is a very emotional song based on a rather tragic story. This is based on a moment when you realize that the person you thought would be Prince Charming and sweep you off your feet is really not going to sweep you off your feet. And besides breaking up with you, he ends up falling in love with another.

My views about White Horse from Fearless

I like the song for its lyrics. Quite touching story I must say.

Who is Taylor Swift

Taylor Alison Swift is an American country-pop singer. In 2006, she released her debut single “Tim McGraw“, which peaked at number six on the Billboard country charts. The New York Times described Swift as “one of pop’s finest songwriters and country’s foremost pragmatist.

The Fearless is the second album from Taylor Swift. It was released in November 2008 and debuted at No1 position on the billboard 200 album chart.