I haven't entered that many contests - but today I came across a contest with a prize that caught my interest. Ben Cook over at the
Blogging Experiment is running a contest where you simply have to link to his site with the anchor text "
make money blogging" or some variation of that and subscribe to his rss feed.
If, and only if, on September 1st, Feedburner reports that he has at least 150 subscribers to his blog (which on a side note - is similar to this blog in that he is trying to generate an income from his blog, though he gives himself one full year (which is probably a lot smarter and more realistic than 100 days (which I've come to realize might be a stretch, though I'm still determined, and hey, if it takes me 150 days, we still might call that a semi-success))) then he is going to award the winner of the contest the
Complete Blogging Package. This package includes a 3 month subscription to the popular
Blog Mastermind Mentoring program, a copy of
Aaron Wall's $79 dollar SeoBook, and
free reviews on
Chrisg.com and the
Authority Blogger Forum.
On top of that, Ben is throwing in some super bonuses for milestones of 250, 500, and 1000 (a $400 dollar review on
Johnchow.com) rss subscribers. Pretty cool, eh? I think so, I like the twist and incentives added. I've got an iPod, you can build links and relationships - but most of these things that will help you in improving your blogging abilities are only going to be had by spending a little money. So why not try to win them for free? Plus, I like Ben's site and plan on following along in his journey and see if he can't help me out a bit in mine.
So maybe you're thinking about running a contest.
Go for it. Just make sure you have the content to back it up. Make sure that people are going to want to participate by offering something of value to them. Make it stand out. It'd suck to run a contest and get two entrants. You might feel a little silly.
Over the next week I'm going to be looking at different contests being run, I might even enter a few. I'm going to look at what's working, and what isn't so that hopefully, by the end of the week I'll be able to launch a small little contest of my own and maybe, just maybe attract more than two entrants.
