After starting a competition of our own, I thought it would be nice to make a blog post about Blog contests and what they can do for your blog.

Why start a blog contest?

Two words, TRAFFIC, and EXPOSURE. The PS3 contest we started, doubled our number of visitors in under three days, and this number has been growing steadily since.

How to publicize your contest?

The main way of doing this is through the use of blog contest websites, check out my post about Contest Beat. These sites will provide you with decent exposure reaping the benefits of a large number of visitors looking specifically for contests.

I also recommend perhaps buying blog posts, on reputable blogs that are related to your own. A well-written blog post can attract a substantial amount of targeted visitors.

What prizes for your contest?

The prize you choose for your contest should either be something popular, and in high demand or something related to your particular niche. iPods, MP3 players, mobile phones, and even TVs are great examples of popular items generally in demand by the large majority.

A niche-related prizes (such as advertising space on your blog) can be effective at attracting visitors that are targeted and more likely to show interest in your blog, rather than simply visiting your blog for the competition offer only, never to return. However choosing a niche-related prize means that you are likely to attract a smaller number of people to your blog than you would with a widely popular prize such as an iPod.

How much should you spend?

Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t matter as much as you might expect. Although I recommend offering a prize with a price tag of at least $100, it is really down to how much money you can afford to spare. Even though a higher value prize can affect the level of interest in your contest, the monetary value of the prize is one of the least important factors of a blog contest. I will explain what other factors may determine the success of a contest later in this post.

Profiting from a contest efficiently.

Making sure you make the most out of your investment is undoubtedly, very important.
The best example of making use of your contest is for your contest to involve a type of ticket-system.
People who would like to enter your contest have to fulfill certain tasks, such as subscribing to your blog, or making a post about your blog contest and the completion of these tasks rewards them with tickets. The more tasks they complete, the more tickets they will gain which in effect determined the chance of them winning the competition. You can assign different values to each task depending on the importance of it for you.

Factors affecting the success of your contest.

• Initial popularity of your blog (if you already are getting 1k visitors each day then news of your competition will spread very quickly whether or not you actively market your competition.
• Your reputability will also affect the number of people taking interest in your blog, deciding whether or not they should invest their time and trust in your contest.
• Value of your prize can determine the level of interest in your blog.
• How well you market your contest.

If you’re the type of person who likes to make quick cash via. Paypal, then we have a suggestion for you. If you haven’t already signed up to DigitalPoint Forums, I would highly recommend doing so because there are so many great opportunities to make money there.

For example, if you are good with photoshop and enjoy creating images then you can head over to the Contest Section, where there’s a limitless number of contests available to the public (Remember that you have to enter to win! If you are skilled with Photoshop then there’s no limit to the amount of money you can earn through this section).

If Photoshop isn’t your thing, then there are plenty of other sections where quick cash is available. For example, Chris (from the Money007 team) has developed webpages in under 1 hour and sold them for a hefty $40 profit on the DP forums. Other quick money resoloutions include (and are not restricted to) buying and selling domains, buying selling and trading websites, providing traffic for money and providing random services such as coding html, CSS or even creating Youtube videos!

There is no doubt that the DP forums can be a very useful place for a webmaster with the right knowledge and experience, but don’t be fooled, quick money comes to those who have experience in certain fields and who know what they’re doing, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (except at money007). Whether you’re a beginner wanting to earn money online, or an experienced online webmaster looking to expand your horizons, the DP forums will prove a valuable asset.

The Money007 Team.

For those of you who have heard about Text Link Ads, TNX works in a similar fashion. It is one massive link marketplace. So how does a Link Marketplace work? Well you can either be an Advertiser, a Publisher, or both. Let me explain…

Advertisers

obviously, Advertisers have the ability to obtain links from publishers for as little as 1 point a link. Currently at the time of this post the point-dollar exchange rate is 1000 points per dollar. So a dollar for 1000 links is not too bad if you ask me even if the links are all PR0.\

Starting your first link campaign is a peice of cake. It’s as easy as hitting the “create new campaign” button. You then are asked to name your campaign, and select the types of sites you would like your links to appear on. The value of links is measured through Yahoo Backlinks and Google PageRank, hence the higher the PR the more expensive a link is.

For accurate targetting TNX allows you to choose the most relevant category to the URL you are promoting. Even better, you can GeoTarget, and only select sites that are in a specific language.

Creating ads is easy too. In fact, it reminds me of the adwords setup. You are encouraged to create a diverse range of ads, just incase the one’s you want are not approved.

Publishers

Publishing, selling adspace is relatively simple too. Firstly you submit your site to TNX, not that your site must be hosted on a server that supports Perl or PHP, and it must already be indexed by Google.

You can decide how many links are displayed on which pages, and what links are displayed. Helping to prevent irrelevnt ads.

Yes that’s right another damn contest blog, you will find them everywhere. Why? Contests are always being created and blogs will usually market their contest heavily as a way of bringing new visitors to their site (because that’s the whole point of a contest), and because it is amazingly easy to find content for contest sites.

What’s special about contest beat then?

Firstly, unlike a number of other contest sites with this kind of coverage and frequency of readers this ContestBeat is free. Other sites often charge upto $150 to post your contest on them.

For those of you who know about our tragic ‘Win a PS3′ competition, we will not make the same mistakes we made last time. If we ever do hold another contest (and we will). One of the changes we will make to our strategy will be the use of contest sites, notably ContestBeat.

As we are approaching the end of the month I thought it would be cool to reflect on the past four weeks, which have been our first few weeks as a fully-functioning blog. Here is a screenshot of visits recieved during the length of the month.

More Stats

• 15 posts have been written
• 14 comments were made
• We put created 1 video
• Altogether Money007 has 71 tags
• We have had one screwup
• Finally, sadly, we have only 4 blog subscribers

Though these results are not fantastic, I don’t believe they’re terrible either and it is difficult to measure our success at such an early stage in the blog’s life. Whose to say this isn’t the calm before the storm and were  not going to see an exponential growth of visitors in July, or perhaps even a surge in blog subscribers? Only time will tell.

This is a follow up to my previous post; Temporary Email Addresses, Handy for Signups.
After some research I have compiled a list of the top 10 temporary email address services available on the internet. Use it wisely.

1. Mailinator
2. MyTrashMail
3. MailExpire
4. TemporaryInbox
5. MailEater
6. Jetable
7. SpamBox
8. GuerillaMail
9. SpamHole
10. 10MinuteMai

Hopefully you’ve heard about RSS Hugger before and if you haven’t let me briefly explain it’s purpose. Putting it simply the site can be used as your feed reader as well as for including your own blog. You can then distribute these feeds with others, somewhat like social bookmarking for blogs.

Here is a quote from RSS Hugger:

The Idea - rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

Not so long ago a $20 registration fee was necessary for sign up, however recently the service has been made free, Under the condition that you make a short blog post about them on your site, which explains the reason behind this post.

Google trends is one of those sites which I love to play around with, I can spend hours happily inputting different keywords, anticipating what strange pattern may be created next.

So as you might expect I was pretty pleased to find out about the new feature that allows you to find out statistics on particular websites.

The DigitalPoint.com trend.