Winning has emotional value. People love to win prizes, and more than the actual price they win, it is the feeling of winning defeating everyone else is what motivates people to participate in a contest. You can capitalize on this, and get more and more people to your blog.
Starting a contest is not a big deal, and nor it takes a lot of money to run a contest on your blog, contrary to what most blogger thinks. You need to just be creative in the prize that you offer to the contest winner. It could be either cash prize, or funky new gadget (ipad, etc.), or it could be the product, services, or consultation that you offer as a paid product.
If you do not want to go through the process of creating and running a contest then you can also think of sponsoring a contest. This, for many bloggers, is the best thing to do, especially for the new bloggers, as they do not have sufficient traffic or network to get more visitors.
2 types of contest you can run
Content-led contests
This is a kind of contest in which your visitors will have to spend some time creating some kind of content (comment, guest post, reviews, etc.). To participate in this type of contest, a visitor will need to spend good amount of time, so the reward should be comparable to the time spent in creating content.
Click-led contest
Promote my blog, retweet my posts, share with your friends, etc. are the examples of click-led contests. In this kind of contest, the visitors do not need to spend more than 5 minutes in order to participate in the contest. This could be a big crowd-puller, as not everyone enjoys the idea of writing for some other blog just to get a chance to win contest.
With this, we will bid adieu only to meet next time around with more information on contests and types of contests you can run.
Tags: Amount Of Time, blog, Blogger, bloggers, Cash Prize, Consultation, Contest Winner, Contests, Contrary, Creative, Crowd Puller, Emotional Value, friends, Gadget, Money, Running, Torrents, traffic, What Motivates People, Win Prizes
You have completed an exciting blog post that will blow the mind away of all the readers. It will fetch 100 retweets, and may be 40 diggs. But, are you sure these things will happen? Have you checked the things necessary to make all these possible? If not then now is the time to verify 5 things that will ascertain a viral growth of your blog post.
4 Things to check before publishing
Linking
Linking to a blog post outside your blog is one the important ways of developing relationships with the bloggers in your niche, which is very important for the success of your blog. You should, therefore, add at least one link to someone else’s blog, preferably of those who is established in your niche. Apart from this, you should also interlink your posts using proper anchor text.
On a general insert one link after every 100 words.
Add call to action
Do not finish your post without adding a call to action at the end of the post. Tell your visitors what they should do now after finishing the article. Give some incredible offer. Tell them what else you have in the bag for them. Tell them what to do and they will follow your lead. They already are primed by your article and sold to your expertise.
About the author
Building your brand is as important a goal as building relationship with the readers. At the end of the blog post, tell them who you are and what you do. This may land you in some cash (I mean business).
Check the structure
Do not forget to reread your article/blog post to check the cohesiveness of the article you have written. You should see if the structure of the article is intact or not.
You can also revisit the title of the blog post and rewrite it, if the article body is not in line with the title.
Tags: Anchor Text, Article Body, blog, bloggers, Blow, Business Check, Business Structure, Cohesiveness, Diggs, Lead, Niche, Relationship, Relationships, Success, Viral Growth
The doomsayers are flat out wrong!
Social Media has become such a huge phenomenon, and many proclaimed that the rise of social media will kill blogging the way television killed the radio, or the Internet killed magazine, the newspaper, and what not. But, this time the doomsayers were flat out wrong.
Blogging did not go away, and social media didn’t become the blog-killer. It didn’t, and both co-existed amiably. What doomsayers forgot to realize that blog has a different purpose than social media. If I could draw a leaf from our life to understand what these people were saying then I will say if blogging is like the magazine you read then social media is akin to meeting you have with your friends, or may be a conference you attend.
How can a conference or friends’ gathering replace the need of magazines?
It cannot. Both are different. Rather the readership of magazine will increase because of word of mouth phenomena cutting loose during social gathering. And that is what has happened to blogging. Now more and more people are blogging on variety of different topics.
Social media has fueled the growth of blogging. Now more and more people are using their blogs to express themselves. Social media along with its status messages has brought writer out of every person. Earlier you couldn’t imaging people saying things that you see them writing on their Facebook walls.
Social media may be huge in its own right, but when it comes to blogging, even a force like Facebook is subservient to blogging. Facebook is used by the bloggers to promote them, and it doesn’t work in the opposite direction. Facebook, twitter, MySpace, and the rest have turned into mere tool for bloggers to promote themselves.
What do you think about this? Has social media become the force or will become the force that will take the place of blogging? Use the comment box below and write in.
Tags: bloggers, blogs, Doomsayers, Express, Facebook, Magazines, Myspace, People, Phenomena, Phenomenon, Radio, Readership, Saying Things, Social Media, Status Messages, Television, Variety, Word Of Mouth
