How to Have a Contest on Your Blog

Having contests is a great way to draw attention--and traffic--to your blog. People love to win free stuff online. Having a contest gets new visitors to your blog; and those visitors might subscribe to your feed or keep visiting. Having a contest on your blog is fairly simple. The key is to make entering as straightforward as possible and explain the rules thoroughly. Read on to learn more.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Blog
• Prize to give away

1. Find something to give away. This could be cash, an ebook, or a tangible product. You could give away something of your own, or you could team up with other people to give away their products.
2. Decide what kind of contest you’re going to have. You could give entries to commenters, have a drawing from entries received by email, or require entrants to write a blog post about a certain topic and send you the link. You could also have a trivia contest or some other type of competition.
3. Post the details of the contest on your blog. Include what the prizes are, how to enter, when and how the winner will be chosen, and any other important stipulations.
4. Promote your contest. Post about it on forums, link to it on your page at social networking sites, and ask fellow bloggers to spread the word. If you have ongoing contests, there are many websites that feature those that you can submit your contest to for free.
5. Choose a winner, announce who it is, and send him his prize. Link to his blog if he has one as an added bonus.

Tips & Warnings

• You can give entries to people who make a purchase from you if you sell products or services. But to keep things legal, you will need to provide an alternate method of entry that does not require any purchase.