How to use contest to increase your traffic

Luis has just finished a contest on his blog. I managed to get an interview with him about his contest. You can learn from his experience on
creating contest:

1. Luis, can you briefly explains what your contest about?

My contest were about performing any possible action that may help my stats and/or give me some income, but the main reason were improving stats.

Basically contestants needed to post about the contest and subscribe to the feed but by email and then earn credits for their actions and comment in the blog.

2. What did you do to make a contest? Where did you get the idea about the contest, and how do you provide the prizes?

First you need to answer yourself a question “What´s in it for me”, by “me” I mean your reader or visitors, why they would join into your contest, Is it worth the effort to join you? You need prizes the bigger prizes more people will want to join.

Then you need to think about the mechanics of the contest, How they will join and then how they will win. This Idea I took it from all the other blogs, since it’s a good way to increase your traffic and stats.

To provide the prizes I just looked for Sponsors since this is the best way to increase the prize without the need to spend all your money.

3. What have you gain from this contest? Did you get traffic spike because of this contest?

As I said my stats improve it, like some spike in traffic, subscribers, my Technorati Authority went from 11 to 27 in 2 weeks time. After the contest some guys bought some ad space in my site due to the increase in stats and traffic. Of course you need to do more contest and not just one, but I will let some time pass before another contest.

4. Is there any negative effect of running the contest?
This type contest that need actions to win may leave you some spam comments just for the sake to win, but you can actually delete some of the spam after your contest, which I haven’t, but I will do it after I finish some tasks I am doing right now.

5. What do you think about the contest? Do you think it is successful?

Does it meat your goal? Yes I think it was successful in a way, I may like it better to have more contestants but it was ok since it is the first Contest of Marketing Business Review

6. If you can back to the past, what would you like to do to make the contest better?

I will definitively look for more sponsors and make a lot more promotion before starting.

7. Any tips on blogger who wants to create a contest?

Yes, take enough time to think about all the details before launching any contest, as well if you want a contest that needs actions to win like mine be sure to be prepare since it is very time consuming versus the ones that just need some actions to enter and then you just use some
random means to get the winner. Next contest I guess I will try to use Random.org to pick the winner its less stressful,lol.

Jan 27, 2009 by
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