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How to Run Blog Contest: 5 Incredible Tips

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Run Blog Contests – Have you been worrying why your blog is not still taking off even if you are working really hard?

Have you ever thought you can bring so much traffic, likes, links, comments, and subscribers just by running regular blog contests?

Yes, running blog contests is one of the best ways to take your blog to the next level.

If you are really serious about making money from your blogging efforts, you must invest the money first. After all, blogging is a business – not fun!

And the best way to invest some money on your blog development is to run blog contests – also known as giveaways.

There are many bloggers who took their blogs to another level by using the simple tactic called blog contests. If you are thinking to start a blog contest and not sure how to do it effectively – this article is for you!

Let’s jump into the details without any ado.

How to run awesome blog contests on your blogs?

Before you are thinking to run a blog contest, ask yourself these 3 questions.

  1. What is your primary goal? Ex: Do you want more comments, subscribers or likes on your FB page?
  2. What is your secondary goal? Ex: Do you want people to share your posts, buy your stuff or anything else?
  3. How much money you want to put in the basket? Pro tip: Don’t invest too much money in the beginning itself.

Start small

Start so small that even if you don’t meet your primary or secondary goals with your blog contests – you shouldn’t be worry about it. Most people invest a lot of money without thinking their primary objectives.

My tip is to start really small. You can start off by giving away something like

  • Themes
  • Plugins
  • Cash prizes
  • Tools
  • Software
  • Videos and anything that comes to your mind (but make sure your offer adds value to YOUR readers)

Make it clear to your participants and keep it simple

If you want to run a successful blog contest, you need to give some rules to your participants.

How to Run Blog Contest 5 Incredible Tips
How to Run Blog Contest 5 Incredible Tips

And make them as clear and simple as possible.

  • What do they have to do to enter into your blog contests?
  • Clearly mention how can they maximize their chances of winning your blog contents?
  • Do they have to stay active daily or just once?
  • How many days, weeks or months your blog contest runs? When can they expect the results?

Pro tip: You need to set a start and end date and make it clearly visible in your blogs.

To run blog contests, you need proper tools

My personal favorite tools to run blog contests are

They are REALLY awesome tools to run contests on your blog successfully and most of all they are FREE.

Approach sponsors and ask other bloggers to run blog contests jointly

Let me make it clear. No one will be interested in providing funds for running blog contests on your websites when you are new to blogging.

So you have to put some money at least in the beginning and until you gain some loyal readership around your blogs.

Then only you can consider asking others to sponsor contests on your blogs.

You can also ask your fellow bloggers (and return them favors by linking to their pages or blogs) to get some money to run blog contests on your blog successfully.

Write a blog post about your contest and make it go viral

This is a must. You need to shout out about your blog contests.

And use the post as a way to showcase your blog contest rules and regulations. Clearly mention what your objectives are.

Ask your participants to share the specific blog post in social media sites like Facebook, twitter, G+ etc. and provide they some rewards for doing so.

Also Read: Top 7 WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Blog Traffic

If possible try to promote your post and spend some money on referral traffic like Facebook ads or twitter sponsors to make your blog post go viral, this way you will be able to reach a wider audience.

The more the reach, the better the results.

Last but not least – tell them clearly how will you decide the WINNER

There are many ways to decide the final winner, either you can choose them randomly using randomizer.org or you can decide on their performance (the more likes they get the more the chances of winning the contest). The final choice is yours.

Stop Making These 5 Blogging Mistakes to becoming

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Blogging mistakes – they’re golden nuggets if you learn from them.
“Every professional blogger was once a newbie” and everybody makes blogging mistakes regardless of what.

Your success ratio depends on how you see the opportunities even on your difficulties. You can’t achieve blogging without making a few blogging mistakes, after all, we all aren’t bloggers by birth.

However, it’s a stupid thing to repeat the same blogging mistakes again and again. Whenever I stumbled upon new sites, I saw so many blogging blunders that could turn off the readers’ minds.

Here are few costly blog mistakes to avoid to become a better blogger.

Avoid Top 5 Blogging Mistakes

#1. Stop checking stats

Seriously stop checking stats once in an hour. What’s the use of checking your traffic spikes when you don’t get enough attention?

Yes, I agree, most new bloggers love checking their traffic stats every now and then, even 10 new visits a day can bring lots of smile on their faces, agree?

Stop Making These 5 Blogging Mistakes to becoming
Stop Making These 5 Blogging Mistakes to becoming

But here’s the catch – instead of wasting your precious time on checking stats, start creating content, blog post ideas or connect with other bloggers using social media sites – it will bring better results in the long run.

#2. Coming up with only one headline

Do you know the ONE top secret to getting more traffic without actually doing NOTHING?

It is tweaking your headlines.

Hell yea, you will definitely attract more leads and clicks on the blog posts which have compelling headlines.

Try to change your headlines if they are not catchy, learn the art of writing great headlines. If you want to always come up with great titles, here’s my suggestion – try to come up at least with 3 to 4 headline samples for each and every post you write.

This is the most effective way of writing noticeable headlines in less time. Choose the best headline among them, try to spend some time in writing compelling titles. It’s worth of your time and energy in the future of your blogging career.

#3. Avoid inconsistency

Most people posts a lot of articles when they are new to blogging – it’s majorly because of the more enthusiasm in the beginning.

When they don’t see the desired results after few months, they slowly get diverted and they don’t publish at all! This is where you have to be patient and remember that “consistency” is the key to blogging success. So, if you want to be a better blogger, avoid one of the biggest blogging mistakes – inconsistent in posting schedule.

First, find out proper posting schedule, even if you are posting twice or thrice a week, it’s fine but just stick to the posting schedule and be consistent to deliver high quality contents to your audience, that’s how great blogs are built.

#4. Avoid long paragraphs

One of the dumbest blogging mistakes to grab people’s attention is this: writing long chunks of content. No matter how great your content is, no one reads or understands what your meat is if you use long paragraphs.

Why?

Most online people love to skim the topics, instead of reading word to word. Here’s what to do to grab their attention.
  • Use sub heads
  • Bullet points
  • Make use of smart interlinking and
  • Use one appealing image per post

I don’t suggest you always to use shorter lines, but they work pretty well. So make sure to find out your own writing tone to cope up well with your blog audience.

#5. Slow loading sites

If there’s one reason I hate reading other blogs is this – slow loading times. Who wants to read a blog which takes ages to load?

Always make sure to give a better user experience by speeding up your site loading time.

Stop Making These 5 Blogging Mistakes to becoming
Stop Making These 5 Blogging Mistakes to becoming

Install w3 total cache, this is the best plugin to clear caches and to make your site loading time faster. And use less image spirits and don’t de clutter your blog design to make it look messy.

In a nutshell: Make blogging mistakes, but try to learn from them to build a better blog. Don’t waste your time by checking the traffic stats or comment count, spend time to create quality content instead.