HOW TO: run a killer competition online

if you are looking to increase your blogs exposure as well as say thanks to your loyal visitors then running a competition is a great way to do this. Furthermore it can also be a useful opportunity for you beef up your mailing list subscribers. There is also many other marketing benefits of running a competition on your blog and it is up to you to decide what your reader need to do to be entered into the competition.

To run a competition you also need to be aware of various laws that you may need to take notice of to make sure that your competition is successful and everyone has an equal chance of winning.

Have a great price

People are not going to enter your competition if the prize is not very desirable. Therefore your prize should be something that is suitable for all of your blog readers, as well as attracting them to enter. If you have an eBook or another product such as a WordPress plugin or theme then this is a perfect opportunity to promote this by giving it away as a prize and it will not cost you a penny. By giving away one of your products you are effectively promoting it and gaining exposure to all of the people who have entered your competition and may not have been aware of it before. Your competition could also be used to drive sales of your product as they may want it even more now that they have not won it for free.

Decide what you want to gain 

As well as giving a prize away to a lucky winner you also stand to gain a lot for running a competition and you need to decide what you are going to gain. When people enter your competition you can decide what you want them to do to be in with a chance of winning such as joining to your mailing list if you are looking to grow your mailing list. As well as this another common thing for people to do is to subscribe to your YouTube channel,follow you on Twitter or like you on Facebook. You could soon gain hundreds or even thousand s of new followers from this. On the other hand you could also ask people to mention you on Twitter so then all of their followers have seen your competition and will visit your website to enter.

Promote your competition like mad

If you want people to enter your competition then you are going to need to do a lot of promotion. If you are promoting a blog competition then I would write a post on your competition;detailing all of the rules and how to enter. As well as this you could also promote your competition in the sidebar of your blog so that all of your visitors are aware of it. Social media is going to be very useful here as you can easily broadcast your competition to all of your followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.