As you well know, the Blogging Idol Contest started on July 1st, with over hundred bloggers competing to get more subscribers… Well, the contest ended today and I would like to share my experiences about it with you.

I didn’t win this contest, it was very competitive and I didn’t give my best. I started very well, increasing by 10~20 subscribers in the first days but then I neglected my blog and well, it’s obvious what happened then. But however, I learned some very useful things which helped me to improve my blog in the last month.

I learned that we (the bloggers) have a lot of opportunities to grow up, but sometimes we ignore or underestimate them, getting stuck in the same place. There are many bloggers out there, and asking them with a simple email for a guest post could be a great way to start knocking doors.

Another thing which helped me to increase my traffic was commenting on other blogs. I found a couple of blogs unrelated to this one which attracted me for their good content. I commented on them because the posts were very interesting, and due to that I got many new readers, something that I was not expecting. So the conclusion to this point, is to comment in any blog you find interesting, no matter if it’s related or not to your blog’s niche.

Something I learned, but I didn’t implement at all in the last month, was to experiment new things. I noticed that some bloggers made things which they are not accustomed to do. For example some of them made screencasts, podcasts and videocasts. So, I learned to don’t be afraid to experiment new things. Many times I prefer to read about something before to try it… Why not to experiment? You can get great results from that.

So the winner of the first Blogging Idol is Abhijeet from http://www.stockmarketindia.net/

 

He started the competition with 953 subscribers, and ended with 1538, an increase of 585 subscribers. Some people claimed that perhaps he was cheating, especially because his blog shows fewer hits than subscribers. Well I did some research and it looks like he is clean.

 

He had been gaining around 250 RSS subscribers every month for the past 4 months already, so a 580 increase is not impossible considering he had an extra inventive on July. Additionally, I also had access to his Feedburner stats and to the complete list of his email subscribers. It all looked fine.

 

So what strategy did the author use? His blog covers stock market tips, buy calls and similar, so he leveraged that content to get email subscribers. The first tactic that he employed was to increase the post volume (to 2-3 per day) and to include a huge email subscription box on top of the content column.

 

Secondly he emailed several Google and Yahoo! finance groups with extensive stock market reports, and inside those reports he inserted a very explicit link to his Feedburner email subscription. The link encouraged people to click to receive free stock market updates and tips.

 

Looks like it worked quite well!

To read more about the Blogging Idol Contest Results, check DailyBlogTips.

Happy blogging buddies!