At any given time, you will find some guest blogging contest taking place at a blog. While some of these contests come off with flying colors, others turn out to be a futile exercise. There’s no doubt that guest blogging contest has the potential to work wonders for all parties involved, including the blog owner, sponsors, and the participants. But a large part of this success or failure depends entirely on the blog owner. If you are looking to organize a blogging contest at your blog, keep on reading to know what you will need to deliver a successful contest.
You will have to divide your plan into three different stages. There are things that you need to do before the contest, during the contest, and after the contest.
Before The Contest
- If you’ve recently launched a blog, then you should wait for some time, while building a strong readership. Remember, I am talking about a community, not just visitors. In order to organize a successful contest, you will need a community that’s responsive, not some random visitors who land on your blog, spend some time, and leave.
- Once you’ve built-up some sort of a community, you are now ready to launch a contest. But before doing anything else, you should come up with a detailed written plan. Not only to keep yourself on track but also because the potential sponsors will be interested in facts and figures before making a decision. Besides, this written material can also be of help when you are writing a post to announce the contest, or promoting it at social networks or forums.
- Once the contest is announced, promote it on all freely available social media platforms. You can also reach out to fellow bloggers. In case some of them decide to take part, they will surely be promoting it on their blogs, and it will give you free promotion.
- At the end of the day, everything is going to depend on the prizes, and for that, you will need to have the right type of sponsors, so you need to actively pursue these sponsors. You can do so by reaching out to relevant businesses and convincing them by showing the facts and figures.
During Contest
- You might think that you don’t need to do anything once the contest is in progress, but that’s far from the truth. If you’ve done the first part right (planning and promoting), you will be getting plenty of posts from contestants, and all you need to do is to post them on your blog. But you should keep promoting and encouraging more bloggers to take part.
- If you are getting good response, there’s no harm in extending the cut-off date for submitting entries to a later date.
- Keep spreading the buzz, encourage the readers to rate the blog posts and help you decide the winners. Make sure you go through each and every post and see who has spent the maximum time in researching and writing the guest posts.
- If the response is good enough, you can also use the numbers to rope in a couple more sponsors during the contest.
After Contest
- Once the contest is over, winners announced, and the prizes dispatched. It’s now time to follow up and make sure that the benefits are not over as soon as the contest ends.
- Follow up with the participants, winners, and more importantly the sponsors to keep them in loop for the next contests.
- You will surely get some new visitors and contributors during these contests, and you need to keep them engaged, and try to turn them into regular visitors.
- Last but not the least, have a detailed analysis of the contest, cherish your achievements, but more importantly, find out the areas where you could have done better, to make sure your next contest will be bigger and better.
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