In this post I will share some thoughts with you about organizing online contests. Blogging contests are an exceptional way to have fun while working online. They are great for making new friends, increasing blog traffic, and provide tons of other benefits to every one involved!
Plz, make sure to read this post if you are participating in our blogging contest. If you are not participating (yet) we have some news for you.
Organizing online contests is not that easy!
Before talking about anything, I would like to make sure that you fully understand that organizing such big contest is not as easy as some of you might think!
Organizing contests takes a lot of time and effort. There are many tasks that will keep you behind your laptop working from dealing with sponsors to participant’s issues to interacting with bloggers during the time you’re running the contest. Basically, even if you do not count the time spent planning, just running the contest means a whole two months of hard work! And oh, yeah! … Don’t forget about your other offline and other life/personal stuff that you have to stay on top of like you usually do while you’re busy running the contest!
So many people are Asking “HOW we did it?!”
I have received a few emails from my blogger friends in the community asking for advice while they are planning their new contests. They asked me how to organize a successful blogging contest and get benefit from it. I have only one simple – but very important- word that answers this question perfectly! It’s “partnering”!
Yes, having good and strong partners will 100% assure you will be successful! You don’t have to think alone; you also don’t have to work alone – especially when it’s about blogging in the very high competition niches we are involved in! And I am going to repeat this forever: Blogging is not a single player game! Why compete with each other when we are in the same boat!
Are we Making Any Money from organizing contests
Yes, we have made a few bucks while running each contest we have run. We do NOT receive money directly from our contest’s sponsors (note: we are sponsoring the contest as well) because we prefer to keep it all for the winners at this point. We depend on increasing FB traffic so we can sell more advertisements and increase our affiliates sales. We have a very special page that has all the services and products that we recommend for bloggers. Using that page is safe because we personally are using/testing almost 90% of these services and products, and the other 10% were recommended by our very close blogger friends. This means everything is recommended 100% by serious, trustworthy bloggers.
Knowing which hosting companies have been tried and left behind and what solutions every one of us ends up using for everything from mailing list management to autoresponders to WordPress Themes to Premium Plugins can save you a ton of time, money and aggravation!
Maybe it’s a good chance to give you a hint, we really appreciate if you take a look to our affiliate page and at any time you want to buy one of these service or products we are recommending then go a head, click on the banner.. do the purchase and we will be glad to receive our commission from it! It’s actually the best way to support famous bloggers without having to pay anything directly to us.
And as you can see, we are making money indirectly from running online contests, also we are increasing our guest blogging activities, and this means more satisfied bloggers in our blogging community as we always hope.
Back to our Blogging Contest stuff
I see that a few bloggers were able to get 100+ comments on their entries in a few days from their publishing date! But what does that mean?
To me it means that they have more blogger friends now – and I have no doubt they have increased their own readership!
To participants? You have probably made a lot of new blogging friends and are enjoying their company on your blog. The contest made you more active, and you have learned at least one new cool tip from it 🙂
To other bloggers? Much of the reason I published this post is to talk to those bloggers who are not yet participating. We were thinking today about extending the contest article submission for one extra week because we are out of time. (The original deadline was July 7.) We mentioned at the beginning of the contest that we might extend the deadline and that is actually what is happening now. We need an extra week to accept more articles and also to have a chance to publish what we already have in the draft and pending section of ComLuv.com and FamousBloggers blogs!
What about the Shy bloggers? This is another chance for them! I hope they wake up from their deep heavy sleep 🙂
Plz, read Gail’s post at ComLuv for more information and tips about how to promote your article in the contest and how to get help on that!
Extending the contest article submission.. why?
We have a few articles which are not published yet. We are doing our best to give everybody more time for article promotion and getting more comments by spreading out the time between each article being published on both blogs!
We could just publish all articles at once and then we will be relaxing and you are the one who will suffer, but that would not be the right way to do this. If you articles disappear from the home page quickly it will not get as much visibility and we would not have as much chance to help on articles promotion.
So, this is why we decided to extend the article submission for another week! The new end date is 14 of July 2010 which we believe is best to make promotions fair for everybody!
Prizes Distribution
Gail wrote about the prizes distribution in her twenty winner post at ComLuv.com, but maybe you missed that post, so here is our prizes distribution again:
- First place wins $750
- Second pays $300
- Third $200
- Fourth through Tenth place prizes – seven of them – of $150 each
- Eleventh through Twentieth place winners – total of ten – $100 each
I wish you good luck!
Feel free to share your thoughts – and if you have any questions I will be glad to answer is in the comments!