The Holidays are great seasons to give away gifts, discounts or free stuff in order to attract new clients. Many people want to win something for free, and that’s why almost every blogger is holding a contest now.

Why on Holidays?

Basically on holidays everybody has that spirit of sharing and love! That’s why many bloggers give away something in order to make stronger the relationship between they and their readers – creating a better sense of loyalty.

What I’m giving away?

Besides my knowledge about blogging, I’m going to give 500 business cards to one lucky winner in order to celebrate the end of this year.

What about you? Are you holding a contest this holidays? Feel free to share your contest with me, I would love to participate!

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…

Once again, it’s time for The AdSpace Contest and I’m proud to announce that I am one of 10 co-hosts.

The idea is simple: Get as many entries as you can (very easy to do) before October 15th. The more entries you get, the better chance you have of winning! Shortly after the 15th, we’ll announce the winner.

The prize?

A 125×125 pixel ad spot (above the fold) on at least TEN DIFFERENT BLOGS that will run for one month. That’s at least a $100 value! Last month’s prize grew to be ad spots on 45 blogs!

Who else is co-hosting?

• Jamaipanese
• Best of Stupid
• AxioBlog
• The Big Bald Blog
• Jason Boom
• Unconventional Marketing Blog
• GorillaSushi
• Geek Mom Mashup
• It Might Be Love
• Mr. Javo

How do you enter to win?

• 1 Entry – Subscribe to any one of the blogs above via email (if you subscribed last month, you’re already entered again!).
• 5 Entries – Twitter about the contest with a link to this post (new!)
• 10 Entries – Write a post about the contest (must include links to all 10 hosts OR use our suggested text)
• 25 Entries – Offer up an ad spot on your own blog for one month as part of the prize package (links will be listed above)

Simply put, you could subscribe to all 10 blogs, write a post, twitter about it and offer up your own ad spot for a grand total of 50 entries! Fill out the form below once you’ve got your entries done.

Contest ends October 15th. Good Luck!!

Hey there my readers, two weeks ago John Cow moved their blog, from Micfo to Top Hosting Center. And due to this, THC contacted him to sponsor a contest on his blog, and guess which is the prize? Yeah! as you read it in the title, the prize will be an Xbox 360 Elite and a copy of the new Grand Theft Auto IV.

There is the specifications:

Xbox 360 Elite console: The console is equipped with an HDMI port, HDMI cable, a black wireless controller and black Xbox LIVE® headset. It also comes with three powerful core processors, 16:9 cinematic aspect ratio, anti-aliasing for smooth textures, full surround sound, and DVD playback with upscaling capabilities right out of the box.

This version can’t be better, it has a 120GB Hard Drive, in addition to a HDMI cable to hook it up to your HD TV to experience the best gaming experience.

How to enter?

The winner will be picked via a lottery and you can choose how many tickets that you have in the draw! The more tickets that you have, the greater chance of winning! Here’s how to get your tickets:

• 250 tickets – Write a small blurb about this contest on your blog, 100 words minimum. Please make sure you linkback to our sponsor and to this post so your readers can find it.
• 250 tickets – Become an affiliate with THC for free. This is really a no-brainer as Top Hosting Center offers 50% commission for each sale you make for them! Within a few sales you can buy your own 360 if you don’t win this one! (We’ll check if you have one of their banners on your blog!)
• 25 tickets – Every comment, about this contest, you leave on another blog’s latest post will get you 25 tickets, as will leaving this link in a new forum thread somewhere, or when you mass message your myspace or facebook friends. Perhaps even use Twitter to let all your followers know
• 25 tickets – Subscribe to our RSS feed and THC’s blog feed.

Deadline

The Contest will run until the 30th of this month, that’s when GTA4 is scheduled for release. So what are you waiting for? You should not miss this .

Good luck!

To gain entries into the contest, just do any of the following:

- Make a comment of value (not just “i agree”, etc.) on a post = 1 entry (remember to comment on all blogs)

- Subscribe to RSS via email = 2 entries (per blog you subscribe to!)

- Write a post about the contest on your blog (must include a link to this page and the links below to participating blogs) = 25 entries

Please note: If you are already subscribed to any of the sites below, you are already earning entries. Also, to get credit for posting about the contest, your post’s link must show up in the comments below or in the comments on one of the other blogs below.

How much easier can we make it? So you can sneak in with just one entry by simply posting a comment here, you can increase your odds by reading and commenting on a few more posts here and at one of the blogs below and maybe subscribe to a couple, or you can really up the odds and subscribe to all all of our blogs (which you’ll enjoy reading anyway), comment on a bunch of posts, and blog about this contest. The more entries you earn, the better your odds, of course. If you’re going to post about this contest, just grab the image and code from here.

The deadline for this contest is 12:00 AM May 1, 2008.

Who wants to pay you?

- JoeTech.com

- Link Bait

- Gorilla Sushi

- CK Marketing

- The Big Bald Blog

- How 2 Blogger

- Jason Boom

- Mr Javo

- AFrogToKiss.net

Enjoy!! Good Luck to everybody!