Holding a contest is an excellent way to get some traffic coming to your blog, website or facebook and twitter profiles. Before launching a contest give some consideration to what you actually want to achieve.

Free competitions and contests can help you build a mailing list or social media presence, get quality one way links, a contest can even be used to help you generate affiliate revenue. It is important to know your goal because this will define how you ask people to enter.

Different types of blog competition and ways to enter

Video contest – Make people create a video and upload it to YouTube or other video sharing sites, in order for this to work you probably need to offer a reasonably big prize. People aren’t going to waste there time making videos for a pack of peanuts.

Facebook like contest – Make people like your page for entry into the draw, these types of contests cannot be held directly on Facebook without the use of a special app – fees involved. You can however link to your Facebook page from your own site and promote the contest that way.

Re-tweet contest – Self explanatory I think. A great way to build your twitter following.

Blog post contest – Similar to the video idea except with blog posts, bloggers are always looking for things to blog about so it shouldn’t be too hard to get entries as long as you advertise well.

Join the mailing list – Incentivize people to sign up for your newsletter with the chance of winning a prize.

You could integrate a few of the above and have a points system, 1 entry for leaving a comment, 2 for liking the page etc. Try to make it either fun or extremely easy to enter.

Make sure someone actually wins – Don’t make up a winner, that’s just naughty and you will get a bad reputation.

This guest post was supplied by Mark, he offers White hat SEO Services in Slough, UK and he’s put together a very handy list of sites to help you promote your competitions.