Blogging contests are fun for everybody involved, be it the blogger, the participants, the judges, or the sponsors alike, but fun is not all what you’ll get by being part of a blogging competition. If you are the blog owner, you will get the buzz, free promotion and shares on social media, new readers, new writers, and lots of new content coming your way. If you are a participant, you will get instant recognition, quality feedback from the audience and judges, and of course, there’s a chance that you will go home with one of those prizes. If you are the sponsor, you will manage to get quite some promotion, back links, and plenty of credibility (even sales if you can get to the sponsor’s list on a blog contest taking place on a relevant niche). As you can see, there are a lot of goodies for everybody involved and a well run and well executed blog contest can give your blog the impetus needed for getting out from the crowd and making its own mark.

Now that you’re convinced about the benefits, here’s a kind of a bad news, having a successful blog contest is not going to be a walk in the park. You can’t just announce a contest and expect the sponsors or participants to come your way. Following are some challenges and requisites that you will have to meet in able to launch and administer a successful contest at your blog.

Setting up your blog:

You can’t really launch a blog contest before having reasonable standing and following in blogosphere. Spend some time getting in touch with other bloggers by regularly commenting on their articles, use social media extensively, make friends with your readers and post lots of quality content on your blog to build the platform for a well-received contest. You must be blogging for at least 6 months to a year before you can plan a contest (unless of course you’re ready to spend hefty amounts on promotions).

Getting in touch with the sponsors:

Established blogs wouldn’t find it hard to grab interested sponsors, especially if they have run some successful contests in past as well. However, if you’re doing it for the first time, you might find it hard to convince the sponsors. You can do so by showing them the stats like unique visitors, blog followers, number of posts, comments, and the likes. For sponsors, try to target small businesses who are selling something that will be of interest to your blog audience, such businesses will be more than happy to be a part of the contest as a sponsor.

Planning the contest:

Ideally, you should be having the plan in hand even before you get in touch with the sponsors, but at times it can be hard to devise a strategy, rewards, terms and conditions before you’re aware of the available resources at hand. So you can get in touch with the sponsors with a rough plan and lay down the proper one after you’ve got some sponsors to back it. Try to be a little more innovative since there are so many contests that simply copy and paste the terms and conditions from each other.

Making extensive use of social media:

No blogging contest will ever succeed unless you’re making the most of social media. Encourage the readers and make it easy for them to share the news with their friends, write short requests to other bloggers or well connected persons in the industry and request them to share the news with their contacts … rest assured many will oblige. The idea is to create the buzz; the more you succeed the more beneficial it is going to be for all the stake holders.

Farah is a blogger, and she writes content for a coupon website featuring discount codes and special offers for websites like 1and1 or Network Solutions. You can save hefty amounts by using some of these coupons like 1&1 Coupon and network solutions special code .

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