Nowadays you can see more and more young people recognizing opportunities and innovating with new  kind of businesses,  introducing new products or services to internet. This young entrepreneurs, like Mark Zuckerberg creator of Facebook, are innovating with their ideas and making loads of money online.

As you may know, is very difficult to find entrepreneurs in your community. An entrepreneur is a person who has the skills and initiative to establish its own business, who assumes the financial risk of the initiation, operation, and management of its business. That is exactly the definition of Michael Dunlop – a young and talented entrepreneur founder of Retireat21.com, a leading showcase for other young entrepreneurs to show their talents and share their stories.

Many of us have heard about millionaire entrepreneurs, like the founders of Youtube or Facebook, but who are they? How they reached their goal? That’s the reason number 1 why I visit Retireat21, because is a great place to meet the stories behind successful young entrepreneurs, to know how they succeed!.

Because of that, I highly recommend you to take a tour for the Interviews’ Section, a place where you can find loads of good advices from interviews of many entrepreneurs like Matthew Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress), Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) or Aaron Wall (founder of SEOBook.com).

So as you can see, Retireat21 is a great website where entrepreneurs can be met, but how to interact with them? Don’t you think it would be great to share thoughts with them? The answer to both questions is YES!.

By participating on the Young Entrepreneur Forums you can exchange ideas and meet the strategies of many successful people with common interests in Internet Businesses, Blogging, Website Promotion Techniques or either topic related with entrepreneurship. These forums are a great opportunity where you can take advantage from, this way you can learn about the mistakes they committed before achieving their goals, avoiding them and going directly to your success!.

What if you disagree with the experiences and information of the forums? You can still learning at Retireat21’s Blog, where many tips focused on entrepreneurship are shared. SEO, viral marketing, social networking or making money online, are some of the topics dealt on the blog.

To conclude…

Retireat21.com is a great website where you can learn about entrepreneurship, learning techniques that will help you to succeed and make money online. Its interviews and forums are excellent resources of priceless tips, so you won’t want to miss them! And that’s not all,  if you are under 22 and you make money online I invite you to sign up for the top young bloggers list.

To Your Success

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 .

They buddies, here is another opportunity to make money by writing reviews. As programs like ReviewMe, Smorty, SponsoredReviews and others, Snapbomb is all about blog marketing, you can join as advertiser or blogger.

Snapbomb is dedicated to providing products to help companies become better at buzz marketing. They have created an effective and easy to use platform for buzz your website and help to improve the marketing on internet. Reviewing products, services or websites is the strongest form of advertising and provides the greatest bang for your buck .

As advertiser you can build traffic to your site, announce your products, services, websites, and ideas to the world!. This is a good way to promote your service, buying a review many bloggers could write about you, and then thousand or million of users will read and know about what you do.

As blogger you get paid by reviewing advertiser’s campaigns. This mean that once you join to the service and add your blog, you can start to write and get paid for that, it’s simple.

How Much Your Blog Worth?

Ok this is something that I’m not agree with the program but I think my worth will increase while I write reviews and increase my PR. Actually my blog worth $3~$13 and thats very low to me, although I’m not ranked by Google I received a good mount of traffic daily, also a good quantity of subscribers. But well, lets see how they calculate your blog price:

The statistics they use to calculate a base value for a blog include:

• Traffic to the blog (how many people visit the blog)
• Blog readership (how many people are subscribed to the blog’s feed)
• Quality
• Spamminess
• Feedback/Ratings
• Community Activity

Additional Value: Targeting

The base value is then adjusted for every single campaign/opportunity based on targeting parameters provided by the advertiser. For instance, if an advertiser creates a campaign targeting blogs related to the auto industry, then a blog about cars will have a much higher value for that particular campaign. This enables the advertiser to get their message to a targeted audience and bloggers get compensated for their expertise in writing relevant posts for their blog content.

Conclusion

Snapbomb is a good program for people who are starting on the blogsphere, I mean it’s perfect for beginners, you don’t need an specific pagerank or alexa rank to be accepted…