Blog Competitions, Memes, Tagging, and Contests
In the struggle that many people face while trying to painstakingly grow their blog, they venture to methods that sometimes create more work and hassle than they may be truly worth.
Countless times, “bloggers” who start a competition/contest will end up being linked to on every blog imaginable – it simply isn’t true and will never happen – even the most popular sites won’t receive reciprocal links from every website in the world if they announced something groundbreaking. While contests can help get your name out there as someone who can grow your blog “artificially,” it won’t permit the growth of readership, unless you explicitly state that in order to be a winner, you have to subscribe to your blog.
How do each of these promotion methods excel and where do they fail short of results? First off, we’ll take a look at the definitions.
Definitions of Each Type of Promotion
Some of these terms may be familiar to you if you are a long-time blogger, but to those of you who have just begun blogging, these are rudimentary definitions for each term.
- Blog Contest - An event that you run on your blog in hopes of gaining new subscribers, a little extra income, or new visitors. Generally, they run for a month or two, a long time in respect to the Internet. Rewards of these contests can either be cash or other gifts, sometimes related to the niche that your blog is in. Readers/visitors must leave a comment, provide a link back (through a post), or subscribe to be entered into the contest.
- Meme - As a short definition, a meme is simply an idea that is spread (generally through a request) from blog to blog. One person typically starts it, with others following. The main idea behind a meme is that each person evolves the main/basic idea, to their thoughts on the topic.
- Tagging - When you tag someone, you create an informal “interview” request, asking them to follow-up with responses to questions or submissions that someone else (if you are not first) has tagged you with. A list of tags may be questions as basic as “Why did you start blogging?” to more in-depth answers, usually the list is shorter, up to ten questions.
- Competitions - A group of individual bloggers, sometimes sponsored by a larger blog or company will get together to “compete” in a contest, with rewards for both the winners of the contest and readers (sometimes). The main idea is to see who comes out as the “dominant” blogger, although fun is the general premise of these.
The Negatives
Finding a great way to promote each of your contests and promotions (whether it be in the form of a meme, new project, contest, or competition) takes either time, money, or both. In many cases, you don’t have the time required to make it successful, so you are left with only a slight increase in traffic, subscribers, etc., until your traffic returns to pre-contest status less than a month later.
For this reason, I have and likely will never run a contest on this blog or any other website I run. Instead of promoting a contest that will likely never receive partners, you should be focusing on building your subscribers naturally. Create content that people want to read, based on the niche that you first got into because you loved to write about it.
Contests and competitions also have another damaging effect on your blog – if you can’t provide the level of awards for members, visitors, and readers, they won’t feel obliged to enter the contest, as it simply isn’t worth the effort on their part. Sure, if you build up enough rewards that it becomes a ten-second decision on their part, you’ll be either setting yourself or your sponsors up for failure if you can’t fulfill all participating parties. Therefore, the results of the failed contest will potentially be more damaging if anything should go wrong in this respect.
Finally, competitions and contests need to be extremely well prepared, or there could be loopholes that people are able to exploit to their own advantage. You need to research what is involved in setting up a successful contest for hours before you can even venture into contacting sponsors or purchasing/gathering rewards.
Memes and tagging are slightly different – they rely on your blog being at least somewhat popular, or it will still be regarded as a “starter/spam” blog. These two tools do not require a whole lot of time, but are generally not as time-worthy, since a full-fledged post or interview that you conduct and write yourself would be viewed as more beneficial, rather than requesting someone, without much prior notice, to expose some aspects of their semi-personal life and/or thoughts on controversial issues.
Positives
From the negatives I posted above, it may appear as though I completely despise blog contests and other methods of promoting your blog that appear “fishy.” However, you have to approach each type of promotion method in a distinct way that can allow you to excel on your blog in terms of your goals.
Like previously mentioned, all of these methods can produce results, no matter how trivial to long-lasting. The way I look at it, a single blog contest running for a month may bring in the same results as a single, well-developed and elaborate post that reaches StumbleUpon, Digg, and the likes of other social bookmarking/networking sites. Rather than heavily promote a contest that may draw in a few dozen extra visitors each day, the single/set of posts can result in a more blogosphere-aware blog/name than the single, month-long contest. In either case, you are bringing in traffic and subscribers, so if that is your short or long term goal, then it may be worth running a contest in that respect.
Memes and tagging others are a great way to get to know other bloggers that may share similar interests. You can’t beat the relationships that are formed as bloggers, so tagging someone or getting their insight on a meme can build a stronger bond between two or more bloggers who want to get to know each other better.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
The end goal of contests, competitions, memes, and tagging is different for each person, so I cannot make wide-sweeping generalizations for every blogger in the world who wants to venture into creating a contests. This post doesn’t deal with the essentials of creating a successful contest or competition, but the main way to create a successful contest is to do proper planning before you begin and be sure that you will be able to provide the winners with the awards/prizes that were specifically meant for the contest. Plus, be sure that you fulfill the requests of someone who asks their opinion on a particular meme or tags you.
