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 .

Nowadays, almost every time you read a blog article you can find links pointing to other articles of the same blog. Internal linking is one of the most common strategies used by bloggers in their posts due to several reasons, which I’m going to explain in this post in order to let you know the secret behind this behavior.

Have you asked to yourself what happens with your old posts? And when I say “old” I want to refer to the posts you have published months ago… Well, let’s say that your visitors use to share your posts through social media networks, getting that post a good exposure and being a boom for some days. A week after, that post won’t be read with the same frequency which people read it in its first days with. Of course, if you do a good SEO you will attract visitors to that post through search engines, but it won’t be the same.

So there are other strategy which you can use in order to enhance the traffic of your posts, and that strategy is called Internal Linking.

The Advantages

What do you win by linking past posts? A lot! and I’m going to explain you why. If someone visits your blog for first time, you would like to make it subscribe to your blog right? Many times happens that people visit your blog and if they don’t like the first content they read, they just leave without reading anymore. If you link other related articles inside your posts, people will click all those links and this way, they will read more content of your blog.

Tip: is very important to use the attribute target=”_blank” in order to force that links to open in a new tab/window of the browser.

The problem is when you link many posts inside other ones, because the user will click all of them and then they won’t know what to read first. Sometimes that happens to me, I end with 4 or 5 articles of the same blog opened in my firefox and it could be hard to find a chronological order.

So once you learned that, let’s review the main advantages of internal linking:

• Promote your other posts.
• Make your visitors stick to your blog.
• Increase the possibility of getting new subscribers.
• Increase the number of backlinks pointing to your blog.
• Increase your ranks (pagerank, alexa…) because of the backlinks.

The Disadvantages

I think there are no disadvantages on this topic. Well yes, it is very important to remember that you should not bombard the users with plenty of internal links in your posts. As I said before, they could get bored or they couldn’t find an order among the posts you are linking, and this could end with a confused user closing all those posts that you linked. This way, you could get the opposite effect that you wanted to get which was the catch of a new subscriber…

Conclusion

Certainly linking other own articles in your posts can be a good idea to make your readers stick to your blog. Something you need to remember is to don’t bother them with several links, I suggest you to link 1 may be 2 posts and not more than that. More than 2 posts could result a negative reaction, and you don’t want to frighten your visitors . Any suggestions? Feel free to leave your comment and help this community to grow up!

In the latest years, there has been an impressive increment of blogs on the web. Every day a new blog is born besides many others of the same niche, using free or self-hosted domains. This make me think about the overpopulation, we can see it around the World and nowadays on Internet, wherever we look it seems to be already taken or developed by someone else, no matter the niche you look for. So if every niche is supposedly supersaturated, how is it possible that every day more and more blogs emerge on the Internet? All those blogs are providing different information or perhaps duplicated content? how can they be different when there are hundred of blogs of the same nature?

In all this months I have being blogging, I have read several blogs about making money online, seo, internet marketing and other variated stuff. Something I noticed all them have in common with each other relates the writting style. Each blogger has a different writing style, it’s something that characterize them.

There are something very common in this atmosphere, each blogger (includding me) have repeated something that it wrote in the past, an idea for example. But all these bloggers are really repeating their past content or they are just developing something new based in a past idea?

That’s something I have asked myself for, because I recognize that I have written very similar articles, but they can be saw from different perspectives. And now is where we got the different points of view, between the blogger and its readers.

Normally the blogger won’t feel it’s repeating its articles, unless it is too obvious. Nevertheless, the people at the other side of the the web, the same people who read its blog constantly can have different thoughts about this topic. More than the blogger, its readers are the persons who recognize the blogger’s misspelling, and also the duplicated content. If you are duplicating in any way your ideas, your readers will notice it, and eventually they will notify you.

Could be the blogger’s writing style the responsible of this?

What if I told you that the one responsible of this is the blogger’s writing style? Yes, after analyzing this topic I thought that may be some articles of the same blogger are very similar simply because all they were wrote by the same person! The writing style is something unique, and probably each blogger’s mind tends to unconsciously “repeat” the same idea, just because it’s focused and based in a big main idea, which in theory should be the blog’s niche; make money online, social networks, technology, food etc etc etc…

So when you think that a blogger is repeating the content, instead closing it’s blog why don’t you tell to it your feedback? I think it could be a WIN-WIN situation for everybody.

Hello readers, yesterday Zac published a post titled Do You Suck at Making Money Online? And I consider that it’s something that can create a good discussion here.

Gary Vaynerchuk was who initiated this topic with his video post I Suck!, where he talks about the things he sucks at. The thing is that he suggested to focus on what you are good at, skipping those things what you suck at.

Well I think that the people who think negatively, will not ever reach their goals, or at least, will be very difficult for them to reach their goals. This is not about blogging or making money online, this is about an attitude that you can assume in the life.

Thinking negatively or thinking the things what you suck at, will stuck you in a mental state where you will see the bad side of everything, being difficult for you to appreciate and estimate the things what you are good at. When I started blogging, I had not idea of how hard blogging could be, but really I didn’t care about that. Instead, I was very motivated to learn and do my best in this life style.

I Suck, so what?!

I can recognize when I suck and when I don’t. I’m conscious that I’m not the best to teach you about affiliate marketing for example. There are many guys like Zac Johnson who earn thousand dollars a month through this way, and I congratulate them for that. But I can’t frustrate or stop blogging because of that. Instead, it is good for me, giving me the motivation I need to keep learning about that niche, until I could find the way to be than successful as they.

So, you need to focus on what you are good at, and explode those skills. At the end, everybody has forts and weak… If you suck at blogging for example, my recommendation for you, is too keep reading and reading about it, the mind never stops learning.

To conclude, work hard in the things what you are good at, and work the hardest in the things what you suck at, but don’t surrender until you have exhausted all your energies .

Hello bloggers, today I want to share with you a thought that I have stuck in my mind since some days ago. This idea involves the most of bloggers, all those who are not in the “TOP A” list of bloggers (don’t worry, I’m in that list too buddies ).

All of us, write some posts a week with passion and dedication, giving our best and waiting impatiently to read the comments and reactions of our readers. But sometimes, though we have a good amount of regular readers, we want to have more and more, and be one of those blogs that thousands of people read daily.

There are many things which can improve considerably your blog, helping you to be one of the TOP A bloggers. I’m going to mention a couple of factors that could improve your blog (just mention ok? I can write about them if you want) :

• Publishing full RSS Feeds
• Writing with consistence
• Replying your comments
• Promoting contests
• Publishing original content
• Giving away free stuff
• Getting interviewed

The possibilities are infinites. But though you try to do everything you read in other blogs, sometimes all those tips don’t work for you. So why are you reading this post? Because like you, I had tried some tips that didn’t worked for me. Now, I’m going to tell you a series of tips which I consider important, to take your blog to another higher level:

• Take care of your Blog’s Design: Although many people don’t care about their blog’s apparency, it’s very important to have a good design. The more attractive your blog’s design, the more readers you will catch. This is a logical thing, if your blog has a poor presentation, don’t expect so much about it. Try to keep your widgets aligned, this way your sidebar will look ordered.
• Take care of your Tagline: You need to have a good tagline, or a simple message that you can place in your header. This message needs to be short, but it must be consistent to give to the new people who come to your blog, a hint of what’s your blog about and what they will find… You got it .
• Upgrade your Blog: Is nice to keep upgrading constantly your blog. Upgrading is different than updating watch out! I’m not talking about posting frequently, I’m talking about providing new features in your blog. Though it can be hard, it can boost your audience and subscribers. Things like new categories, polls, widgets or even redesigning your blog, are perfect to take your blog to a higher level.
• Give away a product for free: Everybody loves to get things for free. By giving away an eBook or another kind of document, you can highly improve your traffic and readership of your blog. In those cases, remember to leave a link back to your blog!.
• Buy advertising: By buying advertising, you will get more exposure in the blogosphere. You can advertise in other blogs or in social networks, like StumbleUpon or Facebook. You can advertise wherever you want, there are many places to do it. The thing is that you need to advertise a Landing Page, something that I will be writing about in the next days (stay tuned alert).

What’s Next at Mr. Javo dot Com?

At the end of this month, I will finish my semester. So when I do it, I’m going to invest the most of my time here , and there is the things I have planned to my blog:

• Add a Newsletter, that you will receive every weekend with the hottest news.
• Upgrade some pages, like About’s page.
• Write more post for beginners.
• Additional Features…

To conclude this post I want to ask you something, what do you think about this topic? Share your opinions about the factors that could help you to take your blog to another level, I want to read your ideas! I could apply some of them in the next month .

PS: I’m wondered of how my Blogging For Begginers’ Page has grown .