Hi everyone, since 1 hour ago I have the Wordpress manager openned, but I just couldn’t start my post before… I wasted some time reading some great feeds, news, articles and looking stupid videos on youtube, as the following one:

That was funny huh? Well, what’s this post about? This could be named an experiment, to see if it’s possible to create any kind of reactions by writing something real quick, and without sense at all. Some minutes ago, I had not idea about what was I writing, but now I find a little path among this randomness.

What should you make in order to get reactions?

With the passing of time, I have seen viral things being spread through the web, and they didn’t have sense at all. So I was thinking about it, and I have listed some things that I think you can generate some buzz from:

• Craziness: The most of the viral videos have a little of craziness, shocking you the first time you see it. That’s why they are viral, because many people get shocked and then, when the video ends, they decided to share it with friends, just because they cannot believe it!.
• Professionalism: When something is very very impressive because of its quality, it will generate buzz without any doubt. This factor cannot be combined with the last one, perhaps you can add a bit of amusement in order to make it more fun and enjoyable.
• Charisma: You can suck at what you are doing, but if you have the gift to manipulate and convince people about what you are saying, certainly you will impact them.

Also, by doing something really terrible/bored you can attract the people attention, but this is a harder task.

Now, let’s take this 3 elements and let’s put them together focused in a blog. Blogs depend of the personality of the blogger, but there is something that can affect this behavior, and this thing is the niche. You cannot act like a crazy if you are blogging about something important, something related with your business for example… But instead, if you are blogging about your life, you can do it so crazy as you want.

There is a balance?

Of course! You can blog about something relatively serious but giving it a touch of your personality, being funny sometimes… But watch out! You need to measure this kind of behaviors because not everybody likes them. May be, you can start losing readers because of that.

Moral

Every story has a moral, and this post also has one. You won’t always know what will cause reactions on your readers. What many bloggers do is to stick to things/methods that have worked for them before. That’s a good idea, but also could be a bad one. What I recommend is to experiment! You can’t know if something will work if you don’t try it.

Don’t be afraid of trying new things, perhaps you discover a non wise potential that tapeworms . Wow! I got over 500 words in this real quick post which I wrote it in less than 30 minutes, what do you think about it?

There are many ways to boost your blog that you can use to increase your subscribers, visits/month, pageviews, etc. In this contest, I will make a study of what I did in my last contest, how I do it and what were the results of applying different techniques…

Promote Something

It’s good to do giveaways without a reason, but it’s even better if you have a reason to do it. If you have a product or service that you want to promote, do it! I recommend you to offer free samples of them, this way you will attract many people, making them stick to your site just because of the product/service. In my case, I was promoting my ebook The Affiliate StartGuide, which the people could get for free by signing up for my newsletter.

Remember something, people love to get things for free. So if you offer them something without charging a penny, you will attract masses…

Find Sponsors

The major of the blog contests on internet are based on Entrecard Credits. That’s not bad, but there are so common and at least that you give away a big amoung of credits, 50k or even more, people won’t pay attention to you.

How can you make them think something different than “bah! It’s just another entrecard contest…” ? Giving uncommon prizes. The first thing you need to do before launching a contest, is to find sponsors for it. Contact companies and bloggers related with your niche asking them for sponsorship.

How I did it? I contacted them by using the following email:

Hi Company/name of the blogger,

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Javier and I manage a blog on http://mrjavo.com, which is related to blogging and internet marketing tips.

Recently, I launched Mr Javo dot Com 2.0, which have some new features, including an ebook and a newsletter.

In order to promote the new features, I’m holding a contest which has over $XXX in prizes, sponsored by companies like XXXX,YYYY,ZZZZ among others…

How does it work? To take part in the contest is simple, the users will need to sign up for my newsletter. Once they signed up and verified their mails, they will receive a copy of my new ebook. As you see, is very simple. I will pick 10 lucky winners through a drawing using the service provided by random.org.

What do you get? By sponsoring this contest your website, product or service will be exposed in front of thousand of users, making it a win-win situation for us. This is something big, and I will sponsor it through many ways, including social media networks, forums and blogs, among others…

Let me know if you want to sponsor something, a service, product or anything else is very well welcome!

Best Regards,

Mr Javo.

In this email, there are some important aspects that you need to clarify:

• Brief introduction of yourself, how you are and which’s your blog.
• Why are you asking for sponsorship?
• If you count with other sponsorships, mention them.
• How the contest will work?
• What will a sponsor get by sponsoring your contest?

If one of these aspects are not especified in your email, you have the risk of being ignored, and even more when you deal with big companies… You can use that email format or improve it even more.

Something is sure, the bigger your prizes the more the BOOM that will cause your contest…

Spread The Word

You have different ways to spread the word about your contest. Adding the post of the contest to social media networks (such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, etc…) is a great way to do it, because of the infinite users that you can contact over there. If your contest is good enough, your friends will share it and the other people too, being a big chain read by several people.

By talking of your contest in forums like Digital Point can help you a lot, because there are many users that are looking for an opportunity to get something for free. But something that I highly recommend you is not to ask to your readers to share your contest. Why? When you do something good enough, you don’t need to ask to, and also, it will be more legitimate.

Invite People… directly

Another way to get more participants is contacting the people directly. As the email that I wrote before, I also wrote a letter of invitation, which I spread through the contact forms of the blogs. I invite directly some bloggers, who replied me with an affirmative answer…

Have Fun

Don’t take it so serious. Don’t stress or feel bad if you don’t get great sponsors, it could be a difficult task. In my past experience I contacted many people, getting rejected or ignored by some of them. So, don’t feel bad and keep contacting another people, hopefully you will get great prizes for your contest…

Analyzing My Results

Everything I told you in this post seems to be great, but how was the performance of it? Well, first of all, let’s review the changes in the RSS counter:

When I started the contest, I had an average of 240 subscribers. As you can see, in the first 3 days the number of subscribers jumped over 300! Getting a big peak of 500 in a week (the 7th day). At the present time, I’m handling 450 subscribers, which means that I increased over 100% the number of subscribers!

If we talk about the number of followers on twitter, mybloglog and other social sites, I can’t give you an exact number but I can tell you that I have had a good reaction too.

At the end of the month, I ended with over 100 subscribers listed in my newsletter, which means that I increased that number over 100% again!

To conclude, I can say that I boosted my blog more than 100%, increasing my followers by RSS, newsletter and social media networks. That’s a great thing, it means that I expanded my brand and now, I’m being read by more people than before, helping me in my future actions, contests and projects.

So do you have doubts of my success? I don’t think so… If you need help to hold your own blog contest, don’t doubt on asking me, I will be glad to help you .

Hello people,

First of all I want to thank to all the people and companies that sponsored this contest! All the prizes are valued over $2500, and today we will meet the 10 participants that won the awesome prizes! To remember which were the prizes, visit the post of the contest.

As I promised, I recorded a video to guarantee the transparency of the sweeptakes. I don’t know why, but the video presents a delay between the audio and the video after some minutes of recording… I recorded it 3 times and I got a the same result, so I apologize for that… The important thing is that there are 10 winners!

Congratulations!

I will contact the sponsors to let them know that you won in order to claim your prizes! Thank to all the participants and good luck for the next contest!

Updated PS: I have contacted the sponsors of the first 5 prizes. Due to there are several sponsors is a hard task for me to contact all of them! So, to claim your prize, go to the post of the contest, visit the sponsor’s page and contact them directly. Tell them that you have won XX place in my contest and that you want to claim their XX prize.

Sorry for that, but it’s hard to handle something of this magnitude…

Hi buddies, first of all I want to let you know that I have released a new section of my page called Web Design Services. As you can imagine, over there you can find all my design services which include:

• Not available yet.

So if you want to hire me for one of those jobs please use the contact form.

Now let’s check what I found this week. Personally, I think that there are very valuable resources of Seth Godin and Chris Brogan among others!

• 8 Google Lessons I’ve Learned from Garry Conn by Yan on Thou Shall Blog.
• How I Use Twitter at Volume by Chris on ChrisBrogan.com.
• The Importance Of Participating In Forums by Mattaw on MoneyBites.
• How Planning Can Make You Broke by Alex on JohnChow.com.
• Top 7 reasons affiliate marketers should be using StumbleUpon by Derek on Click Consultants.
• The number one secret of the great blogs by Seth on Seth’s Blog.
• 5 Brand-Building Actions Every Freelancer Should Take Now by Dave on Freelance Folder.

Yan talked about 8 Google lessons that he learned from Garry Conn, and I have to say that it’s a great post that I have learned from!

Also I highly recommend you to check out the post of Alex on JohnChow dot Com. It’s very related with the article that I posted this week titled Do You Plan Your Projects.

In conclusion, all these posts are great! So I hope you like it and see you the next week!.

To finish, I want to wish Good Luck to all the participants of my Contest! Tomorrow I will make the sweeptake through random.org…

Many times in our life, when we want to make something big, we spend many times planning how everything will work. Either your next vacations or your next business, before carrying it out is recommendable to organize your ideas in order to have everything clear and be ready to work on it.

The planning process is essential if you want to know what to do when things don’t go according to plan.

That’s a great quote that I always remember when I’m planning something. May be it’s obvious, but is good to remember that planning everything before to do something is essential for the thing you want to do. Many people who start making things without goals, end failing and quiting the project because they were not following a path. They never had neither goals to reach nor purposes to keep working, and finally when they get stuck with something, they quit. Ok I have mentioned the word planning many times in this post but what’s the big deal with that? What should you know when you are going to write a business plan?

The Planning Process

In this graph you can see what’s the process of planning suggested by me. First of all, you need to have a vision of the project, defining how everything will operate and how all its elements will be interconnected. So then, defining the mission and goals of your project will help you to keep working the hardest in order to achieve these things. Basically, if you don’t know what do you want to achieve, you will be wasting your time working in something that hasn’t an end…

Study the environment in order to know the market: competitors, consumers… By studying and knowing the competition you will be a step forward of them, so you could develop and offer something better to those people who are using the service or product of your competitors. Once you have analyzed your targeted consumers, determining what they are looking for and what they expect of your service, you will be ready to keep working on your project.

When you want to achieve something, you need to have more than one way to do it. By analyzing and planning different strategies you will have different alternatives in case you fail with one of them. So this could be trial and error, changing of strategy and trying again could be a process of weeks until you get the secret formula, which will give you the highest conversion rates, sales, etc.

After that, once you have analyzed some strategies, analyze their risk. Which one can make you lose more money? Which one can make you lose in front of your competition? All that kind of questions are studied in this phase, and answering them can help you to choose and implement a strategy.

Great! You have selected a strategy but now, it’s time to run your plan! That’s right, now you have to materialize all your efforts in something that you can feel proud of. It would be great for you to see that you didn’t spend time planning the project in vain, and to see how everything is working as you thought and planned before.

Everything will be working fine, everything is pretty and you will feel happy… for a while. Since the first minute your project’s life, you need to start tracking everything in order to analyze and see if going well, if you are not wasting money/time or if the consumers are doing what you expected… So it’s time to analyze the results.

No matter what’s the result, if your business is going well or bad, you need to optimize it. This is a critical phase because of it will depend the life of your project. Find the way to improve the experience of the consumer with your service or product, find how to make them stick to you and keep them using what you offer them.

The Loop

As you can see on the graph, once you are in the bottom of the chain you need to go back to the beginning. In the phase of optimization, you can improve the current strategy or look for another one. No matter what you choose to do, you need to evaluate the risk of the future changes you want to do in order to have everything under control.

I don’t guarantee anything, but if do everything well following that scheme, it would be hard to fail on what you do. Perhaps this is a very simple and general scheme, is good to have an idea of what you need to do when you want to plan something. Also, depending of the business, you should add more phases to that scheme to complement the current phases.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to recommend you to take your time and don’t put yourself under pressure, try to define some milestones and deadlines for the project, and stick to them. If you cannot meet your deadlines, give you a second chance and extend them, but always have a top. This will motivate you to work the hardest.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

-Leonard Bernstein

LaHi readers, this week I was a little busy with the university but however, I collected some great posts for you:

• How to Change the World Using Social Media by Brian on CopyBlogger.
• How to Improve Your Blog When You Don’t Have Computer Access by Darren on Problogger.
• What I Told the Higher Ed Conference People by Chris on ChrisBrogan.com.
• 5 Reasons Why Flipping New Sites Is Better Than Keeping Them by Jay on SuiteJ.
• How to setup an efficient WordPress blog from scratch by Vladimir on Prelovac.com.
• The Best Way For Internet Marketers To Spend $50 by Matt on Blogging Fingers.
• The Net Fool’s Method for Using Images in Blog Posts – Give Your Articles Style! by Jim on TheNetFool.

Latest Updates

Some days ago, I added a page where you can find all my social profiles on Internet, so feel free to add me at any of them.

Also, the new section of Web design is coming, I’m thinking about the prices and all that stuff… Surely I will launch my design services the next week!.

I have planned to develop a WP Theme (kinda basic) for you for free, in order to spread my word as designer .

Well I wish you a good weekend, thanks for coming back to check this round of links!

PS: Check out this tool, it’s perfect for lazy bloggers .