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 .