For a newly set-up blog, the reason for organizing blog contest is probably because of the want increase the exposure and interactions that are happening around the blog. And that’s why I launched my iPad 2 giveaway over my site – Kissing Crust.

While for an established blog like Famousbloggers.net, the reason may towards strengthening the branding of the blog.

Let’s take the contest that Hesham has just announced the winners.  I am pretty sure the objectives behind the contest is strengthen the content base of Famousbloggers.net especially in relation to internet marketing contents. With this contest, it will help to push this site to be source of great internet marketing contents and therefore, will boost this site traffic and user engagements.

And in case your new year resolution is to have a way better blog in 2012, organizing contest can be one of the ways. Unfortunately, the result that you want to see after organizing your contest may not meet your expectation or even worse, cost you more than you can earn.

These 7 must-follow tips will ensure the success of your blog contest.  Are you ready to organize successful blog contest this year?

1- Set Up Your Objectives

The first thing you must do before launching your blog contest is to set what you want to achieve from the contest. The most important element for this pointer is to keep the objectives as simple as possible.

Don’t create contest to achieve everything that you can think of. If you want the contest to create interactions within you blog through blog commenting, create the contest that will encourage people to leave comment and that’s the only way they will win the contest – not through who tweet most, who share most in Facebook or must create contest reviews.

My advise: Have only one objective for one blog contest. It will make it easy for your contest to be understood and joined. This will help you too in managing and monitoring the success of your contest.

Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t. (Peter Drucker)

2- Use Contest/Giveaway Tools

Give yourselves a break. Use contest/giveaway tools like CompResult and RaffleCopter to manage your blog contest. You may not find it handy at first but trust me; when your blog contest gone viralled and thousands of people joining your contest, this kind of tool will definitely save the day.

I have always use RaffleCopter to organize the contests over my site. The reasons why I love it are you can moderate the entries, it will help you choose the winners and most importantly, it keeps the record of who join your contest.

This can be handy when you want to launch another contest in future. With simple emails, these are the people who will help to push your contest to go viral and be a success.

My advise: Save your time and effort if you can. If you not planning to use any tool, make a simple contest and avoid using point-based system to select the winner. Use Random.org if you can.

3- Get A Prize Everybody Want

You do not need to offer lots of prizes. What you need is to offer a prize that will make everybody gone crazy. For me, offering a brand new iPad 2 is definitely better than a contest with prizes that worth more than $1000.

People do everything for iPad 2. If you offer such prize, people will do everything for your blog to win.

So, instead of wasting $1000 for prizes that you still not sure whether will it get people excited, why don’t you simply get an iPad 2 worth only $499 for the winner which will definitely create a lot of buzz over Twitter?

My advise: Less is definitely more. By offering limited prizes, it will create a better sense of competition to get the top prizes which will leads to more participations and site visits.

4- Keep Close Relationship With Blog Sponsors

The iPad contest that I’m having over my site is also being sponsored with various WordPress theme developers like ColorLabs & Company and ProThemeDesign. By keeping close relationship with them, whenever I plan to organize blog contest in future, the chance of them supporting me is pretty high.

Plus, if you are lucky, the sponsors who are highly influential will also help you to promote your contest to their followers.

My advise: Sometimes, it only requires simple email and honesty to get others’ help.

5- Be Firm To The Winners

Before you launched your blog contest, be firm on how will you announce the winners and give the prizes. My suggestion is to announce the winners through announcement page and the winners should response to you within certain period of times to claim the prizes they have won. If they miss it, the prizes will be given to others.

By doing this, it helps you to save your time and to ensure you can settle everything as soon as possible.

My advise: Even though you have set some terms & conditions, it doesn’t hurt to bend the rules once in a while. After all, the winners have helped to promote your blog

6- Complement The Blog Contest

After a while, you may able to see the direction where the blog contest is going. Sometimes, the buzz that it receives may not as huge as you hope for.

If you are confident the buzz can grow further if it gets more exposure, take necessary action to bring more attention to your blog contest. You can use Twitter, Facebook and ways that can bring new audience to your blog contest.

For me, besides Twitter, this blog contest is also my way to tap to new audience to my iPad 2 giveaway that will end in January 2012 . Don’t forget join it ok? Be quick. It is going to end soon.

My advise: Keep monitoring your blog contest. Always have this question with you: What I want with this contest, have I achieved and if not, will I achieve when the contest ends?

7- Element Of Surprise

After your blog contest has ended, I can assure your site will change in a good way even though the impact can be differ; either minimal or significant.

So, why not you give some surprises the participants as a sign of appreciation?

For example, there are probably few who actively promote your blog contest but do not won any prize. So, give token of appreciations to them. They will definitely love you more!

My advise: Besides use your own fund, you can get help from the sponsor. I am sure some of the sponsors have no issue to give something extra to those who have indirectly promote their products.

Conclusion

Well, how do you find about the 7 tips of creating your next successful blog contest? Do you think it will create a successful blog contest?

Based on my past experiences, it will. What about you?

Last word of advise: Keep your contest as simple as possible but make the prize as attractive it can be. People will floak your contest and you will smile all day long seeing your blog grows day by day.

To help celebrate the launch of MySEOCommunity.com, a global search & social community, bloggers are encouraged to submit their latest and greatest industry post to run on the blog.

If you are interested in participating in this contest be sure to go back and read  the official post to make sure you understand all the rules and details.

The contest runs until March 5th, 2012 and it’s recommended that you submit your post soon – to ensure you have enough time to promote the post. You’ll be judged on the quality of your content. Tie breakers will be judged by traffic, mentions and more (similar rules to other guest blogging contest rules).

The day your post runs, they ask that you help promote your post and also use it as an opportunity thank sponsors by including their logos and links on your blog.

The Mad SEO Scientist Guest Blogging Contest

Not sure what to write your post on? The range of potential topics is pretty wide. From link building and social media to SEO and PPC, you can choose to expand on a topic that you think has the potential to win. Past winning posts include:

• How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO by Kristi Hines
• 7 Practices for Bloggers to Build Trust From Readers by Lee Ka Hoong
• Why You Should Blog Drunk by Jennifer Van Iderstyne

So what are you waiting for? Submit your post today

by registering here!

At MyBlogGuest we have supported various guest blogging contests which encouraged guest authors to submit articles to one specific blog and compete for its popularity in social media (FamousBloggers’ own recent best affiliate product blogging contest is a great example).

Our brand new official contest is a bit different: in it *publishers* take part instead of the writers. Here’s what I mean:

• A blog owner uses our Articles Gallery to grab unique articles for his/her blog;
• Then the blog owner publishes the guest post and shares the link in our official thread inside the forum;
• (Optional but essential for the win) The blog owner helps spread the word: shares the post in social media and gets additional traffic and exposure (which benefits the blog in the first place!)
• In mid February we pick the most popular guest post and the most active user and award him/her with $1000!

Publishers don’t need to do anything extra besides publishing free content! No need to link to sponsors, no need to disclose the are taking part in the contest (unless they want to) – this makes this contest the easiest one you have ever seen!

*Publishers get free content, free exposure and free money (if they win of course) with absolutely no additional responsibilities attached!*

To qualify:

• The blogger needs to be a registered user of MyBlogGuest.com
• The blog needs to be of Google PR 2 (at least).

The contest runs through January, 1 to February, 15 (all the guest posts have to be published within these dates).

Here’s a quick video on how the Articles Gallery works.

Here’s also our official contest press release.

Good luck!

So, let’s get into the point and make this as short as possible, we are about the deliver big cash prizes, and I am sure that no one wants to wait any longer

The Internet Marketing Blog Contest Winners

Here are the winners and prizes:

1. CurationSoft Review: Creating Content Has Never Been Easier, by DiTesco ($1000)
2. Market Samurai Review: Stand On Top Of EVERYTHING When It Comes To SEO, by Jane Sheeba ($500)
3. Should we use Social Media for marketing our Products?, by Sandipan Mukherjee ($250)
4. Take Your Internet Marketing Business to the Next Level in 2012, by Danielle McGaw ($150)
5. How I Got on Ryan Deiss’ Leaderboard AND Won an IPad with a Tiny Email List, by Ana Hoffman ($100)

You can see the blog contest info post here:

Contest Info →

Also we will keep the blog contest results up on our contest page for future reference:

Blog Contests →

Thanks to our Partners

Big thanks to our partners who made the work easier and provided great support:

• Technology partner → BloggersNetwork.net
• Media partner → MyBlogGuest.com

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors

I would love to thank our sponsors who made this contest possible!

• → Search Engine Marketing Company (brickmarketing.com)
• → Best life insurance (lifeinsurancefinder.com)
• → WebHosting Reviews (webhostingdeals.org)
• Make money from → deal of the day offers offers with Deal Zippy
• Fansbridge.com  → How to market on Facebook
• Team Lane → Tri Cities Wa Homes
• AIDY → Movie Reviews
• Resume Writing Services
• Author+ Premium WordPress Plugin → Use coupon code FAMOUS20 for 20% off!

Tools we’ve used to Manage the Blog Contest

Thanks to the CompResult plugin, we could monitor the blog contest progress and bring results together so quick and easy.

If you would like to be informed when we launch the CompResult plugin, just visit the plugin site and leave your email.

Prizes Delivery

All participants should actually contact me right away, don’t forget to include a valid PayPal email id to receive your cash prize.

Thank you all, and Happy New Year!

This is great, but managing a blog contest takes a lot of work and time. There are a few real challenges to face when organizing a blog contest that you have to think of.

Seriously, there are huge tasks and things to do! I realized this after launching a few competitions, and decided not to do it anymore unless I find a solution that saves me time and effort. I had to think of changing the way I manage contests and overcome its pain. But nothing that I know could help with that really!

So, I decided to make my own solution!

I’ve tried many times in the last 6 months to find a way out of this, especially because I like to organize contests on the blog, (actually my blog readers motivate me and ask me about new contests all the time!) So, I thought about developing a WordPress plugin that could help and reduce the required tasks. But, it’s something I really can’t do alone as I have tons of things going on all the time.

Finally, I talked with my partner Mohamed of BloggersNetwork.net about the idea, and actually I had to fly to California to meet him and brainstorm the idea!

And Yes!

Mohamed and I started to work together on bringing up a new freaking awesome WordPress plugin to manage blog competitions. With this brand new plugin, most of the pain of organising contests has now been taken care of.

We call our new plugin CompResult!

And, as you can see from it’s name, the ComPesult plugin was created to take care of all the dirty work, painful tasks, and boring stuff that you will have to do to launch a successful blog contest.

You Can Not Compete with Time, but…

CompResult Widget

There is a fact I believe in, you can not compete with time… But you actually can save some of it!

Take a look at this list of things that you must do to launch a successful blog contest:

1. Make a plan
2. Find sponsors
3. Do a quick blog maintenance
4. Put some pages on your blog
5. Create some creatives
6. Spread the word about your contest
7. Reply to tons of emails
8. Publish posts
9. Calculate results
10. Announce winners & deliver prizes

Cool! mmm…

Yeah, the list can be longer, or maybe you can shrink yours a little, but it is still a freaking painful job, and many people won’t believe it till they do it themselves or at least participate in a contest.

If you are planning to organize a contest or a competition on your blog, then you really have to think twice about how you will manage your time. Time is your main challenge, so you will need to save as much time as you can to do your other daily blogging tasks. I means it doesn’t make any sense that you will spend all your time managing a blog contest and forget about your business.

Yeah, I’ve used Excel spreadsheet, Google docs, main mapping apps, my calculator and even pan & papers!

But, honestly, it didn’t work!

Good News are Always Welcome!

The CompResult plugin manages your blog contest, however you still need a plan

We are getting ready to release the new plugin, after testing it for the first time here on the blog. Check out the blog contests page to see it in action.

Here are some screen shots of the plugin admin page and post editor custom meta box that has been added, plus the results page that can be displayed using a simple short-code, and also the awesome widget that is customizable to allow you to display entries from the contest on your blog sidebar.

Create and manage unlimited contests:

CompResult Setup

Customize each contest blog the way you like:

Customize each blog contest the way you like

You can enable/disable results in table columns for each contest:

Enable/Disable Results Table Columns

CompResult Plugin is Almost Here!

There is a plan to give the new plugin a shot as soon as we have a beta release that is ready for testing. I must tell you that it will be released as a premium plugin with great support, not only for the plugin itself, but other things like helping you  organize your contest by giving you great advice, and maybe send a few bloody awesome sponsors your way!

So, if you are interested in testing this plugin and/or planning to organize a blog contest any time soon, visit the plugin website and leave your contact. We can then notify you when it’s ready and pick a few bloggers for the test!

If you would like to be notified when we launch CompResult, just visit the site and leave your email address.

If you have any question, post them in the comments and I will reply to you!

In this post you will find a list of the articles submitted to the blog contest, I hope you will find it useful and enjoy the read. (this post will be updated to include more links)

Let’s first thank our dear Sponsors

Special thanks to our main sponsors:

→ Search Engine Marketing Company

→ Best life insurance

→ Hostgator.com Review

And, our ideal sponsor:

Make money from → deal of the day offers offers with Deal Zippy

And finally our basic sponsors:

• Fansbridge.com  → How to market on Facebook
• Team Lane → Tri Cities Wa Homes
• AIDY → Movie Reviews
• Resume Writing Services
• Author+ Premium WordPress Plugin → Use coupon code FAMOUS20 for 20% off!

Thumb up to our partners

• Technology partner → BloggersNetwork.net
• Media partner → MyBlogGuest.com

Blog Contest Entries and Links

You’ve got it all!

I would like to thank everyone who involved in the blog contest, and I wish you good luck!

Please, share these entries if you find it useful!

Good luck!

This contest meant to share the best selling affiliate products in the market, but as you see, not every one has the know how of promoting products online, not everyone in our network are actually making money from affiliate marketing, so it seems to be hard job! This is why we are responding to our community by changing the contest rules to make things more easier!

Basically the changes are in the topics!

To make thins more easier for you, we’ve expanded the topic to include general affiliate marketing tips for bloggers and new internet marketers!

Affiliate marketing is a quite wide topic, so you don’t have to write a particular review for a product, if you prefer to share general affiliate marketing tips, then you are welcome to do so!

Here are some ideas for topics that you could write about…

Topic ideas:

• How to find products to market them online!
• Best affiliate networks
• Best affiliate marketing tools
• Growing and driving more sales from email lists
• Conversion tips
• How to create a niche site
• Best practices for ranking a niche site
• How to drive (free/paid) traffic to niche sites
• Landing pages best practices
• Using Social Media for affiliate marketing
• Marketing and selling your own product
• What you’ve learned from affiliate marketers
• Review of your best selling affiliate product
• What else? (if you have a cool idea to share, please add it in the comments)

You see, affiliate marketing is a quite open topic!

Your Cash Prize is waiting for you!

Yes! We have $2000 of cash prizes that is waiting for you to just grab it!

1. First place : $1000
2. Second place : $500
3. Third place : $250
4. Fourth place : $150
5. Fifth place : $100

Participate now in our → Blog Contest

If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will get back to you with a reply.

They are looking for someone who is passionate about ecommerce, is insightful about industry trends, and has a flair for writing. They are hosting a blogging contest on EcommerceWriter.com to fill the position, and the winner receives the following package:

1. A year-long contract for $50 – $100 per blog post
2. The chance to attend Ecommerce and Social Media conferences throughout the year as a representative of Vendio.
3. An iPad 2 to help research and write posts.
4. A free subscription to Vendio’s Get It All ecommerce software package to create and host an online store.

To apply for the position

You simply need to write a post on your blog and submit it to the Vendio team for review.

You can write about the ecommerce topic of your choice, or create a post telling them why you’d be the perfect candidate for the job. The only requirements are that you link to Vendio.com and EcommerceWriter.com in your post so that they can track applicants and ensure every post is reviewed.

Good luck!

Thanks to our sponsors, we’ve got $2550 cash prizes,  we are going to have 5 winners, and prizes will be as the following…

Our Cash Prizes

1. First place : $1000
2. Second place : $500
3. Third place : $250
4. Fourth place : $150
5. Fifth place : $100

*Note: We will cut 20% off the total amount of prizes for contest expenses.

Blogging contest is a great way for exposure, and it’s a lot of fun because you will learn a lot being a participant and you will also have a chance to make new friends in the blogging niche.

How to Write Your Review

You may think that writing reviews is hard, but in fact, it’s pretty easy, especially if you writing a honest review, actually this is the right way to do it!

Let’s make this clear, you don’t have to confuse yourself, this is a pretty simple review, be honest and write about a product you’ve tried before or you are still using, share your experience with this particular product in a review, and give it a rate out of 5.

We will publish your review on FamousBloggers.net, and then you will post about the contest on your own blog and include sponsors links, once you’ve done that you become part of the contest.

The next step will be promoting! You will collect point for each valuable comment, reply and social share on your review, also another good way is to write a review for one of our sponsors on your own blog, this will get you more points.

Click here to Participate in our → Best Selling Affiliate products contest now!

Feel free to ask if you have any questions about the contest.

Good luck!

This contest is organized by FamousBloggers.net and BloggersNetwork.net and MyBlogGuest.com

$2550 Cash prizes for you

Check out our sponsors:

Main sponsors $500

→ Brick Marketing: Full Service SEO Solutions Company

→ Best Life Insurance

→ Web Hosting Deals

Ideal Sponsor $300

Promote → daily deals on your website with the Deal Zippy API

Basic Sponsors $150

• Fansbridge.com  → How to market on Facebook
• Team Lane → Tri Cities Wa Homes
• AIDY → Movie Reviews
• Resume Writing Services
• Author+ Premium WordPress Plugin → Use coupon code FAMOUS20 for 20% off!

*Sponsorship will be closed at 15th of October 2011.

If you would like to sponsor the contest, make sure you contact us before we close sponsorship.

How many winners we will have?!

Many contest organizers have 1 – 3 winners, but we love to give big cash prizes, and at the same time have more winners, this is our way to make more people happy! So, probably we will have from 5 to 10 winners

But we don’t know yet! It all depends on how much cash we can get from our sponsors!

We will update you about this as soon as we close the sponsorship.

For bloggers and internet marketers

This is the best time to start submitting your entries!

The idea is pretty simple, you write a review about the best product you have got lucky with as an affiliate, then we will publish it here on FamousBloggers.net, you get as many people as you can to comment and share your post, for each comment, reply, tweet, Facebook like and Google+vote, you will get points, also you will get more points by publishing a review about any of our contest sponsors.

You will have 15 days of promotion, then your score will be locked, and we will then pick the winners based on their score.

Everyone can track the progress on our blogging contest page, we are able this time to show live progress, it’s going to be so exciting!

Read more details about the contest here → Contest page!

The contest will end at the end of October 2011, so hurry up and give this a shoot!

Feel free to ask if you have any questions regarding the contest

Good luck!