After running the contest to celebrate my blog’s first birthday I realized that I made a few mistakes in the execution of the blog contest that I have since had some time to reflect on. So as a result of that contest I’ve come up with a list of 5 lessons that I learned from running my blog contest that I believe will help improve the effectiveness of your blog’s contests as well.

1. Define your contest goal(s)

Before starting a blog contest you should clearly define the goal of the contest. What are you trying to accomplish?

Do you want people to post about your contest and receive some link backs?
Do you want to increase your RSS subscriber count?
Do you want to encourage more participation?

It’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with your blog contest otherwise it won’t be as effective. I never really set out to define the goals of my blog’s contest and so I ended up with a contest that I ran but without any strong numbers to shoot for. If you set specific and measurable goals for your blog contests you’ll see improved your results because you’re more invested in the outcome.

2. Simplify the contest

First and foremost make it easy for your readers to participate in your blog’s contest. Don’t create a laundry list of hoops your readers have to jump through, but at the same time you don’t want to innundate them with too many ways to enter. If your contest is relatively small like mine was, try providing only one way for readers to enter your blog’s contest. If your primary goal is to increase your RSS subscriber count than use that criteria as the only way to win prizes in the contest. The size of the prize pool should also help you to determine what you should require your readers to accomplish. Because if you’re not offering a lot of prizes than it will be hard to get people to put forth the effort and write about your contest.

On the flip side you don’t want to make it too easy to enter the contest. The perfect example here is just requiring readers to write a single comment on a post to enter the contest. While this makes it incredibly easy for readers to participate I wouldn’t recommend using this entrance method exclusively even if your blog is really small.

3. Offer more prizes

With the contest I ran I offered five 125×125 blog ads on the sidebar along with a 468 x 60 ad. These prizes came out to a total cash value of $140. This is a fairly small sum of money and it doesn’t really bring about a strong call to action to participate in the contest. Looking back at how many people entered the contest I can see how this contest served more of my current readers as opposed to bringing in a ton of new subscribers and link backs. Perhaps a few people subscribed to my RSS feed that were sitting on the fence, but again if I offered more prizes I could have seen much stronger results.

4. Set a deadline that provides plenty of time for readers to enter

I ran my blog’s birthday contest for only two and a half weeks, which doesn’t allow for a long time to enter a contest. Granted, I already knew that the prizes I was offering weren’t really that huge but I should have ran the contest for at least one month to grant plenty of time for people to read about and enter the contest.

If you’re running a really large contest than you may want also want to consider running it for a couple months to not only provide ample time people to participate but to also provide a lot of “face time” for the sponsors of your contest. The lengthy deadline will also give you more time to heavily promote the blog contest as well which leads me into my next point.

5. Promote your blog contest

Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog contest. One way you can promote your blog’s contest is through advertising on your own blog. I did this for my past contest by creating a couple simple banners. By promoting the contest through your own blog it will help to inform any new readers that may have missed the initial contest announcement post. Another way to promote the contest is by mentioning it in the bottom of each post during the run of the contest i.e:

I’m running a contest to celebrate my blog’s birthday. Subscribe to my RSS feed for your chance to win free advertising on ChrisGuthrie.net

Another option that should work well is if you’re offering such a large prize pool that people are much more inclined to write about your contest for a better shot at the prizes. This will help to further promote your contest but will only work well if the prize pool is significant.

Wrapping it up

Overall, I know that the next blog contest I run will take into account some of the lessons I’ve learned above and I’m sure I’ll learn even more the next time around. I don’t plan to run any more “small” blog contests in the future though as I want to go for something much bigger next time.

What do you think of the lessons I’ve learned? Have they helped you think about how you’ll run your next blog contest?

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Are you struggling to come up with a domain name for your blog or next project? Why not choose a name that sounds like or rhymes with an existing well established website. I thought of this the other day when I was waiting to catch my bus to take me into Seattle for work when I saw this truck drive by with big bold letters plastered on the side - Jobdango.com. Now what site immediately comes to mind when you hear ‘dango’? For me it’s the wildly popular Fandango.com. I checked out Jobdango.com and while it’s a Northwest job search engine and not something related to the movie business it’s easy to see what they’ve done by incorporating ‘dango’ into their domain name.

I’m certain that most people that see the advertisements for Jobdango.com or have heard of the website already have likely heard of Fandango.com. They may even go so far as to believe it’s a partner company. What Jobdango.com has done is used the association from another well known brand and applied it towards their Northwest job search engine Jobdango.com

This advertisement on the side of the truck got me thinking about other websites I’ve seen that have used similiar domain names in an effor to build off of some other websites’ branding success. Some other prime examples I’ve seen are dogster.com and catster.com both of which are named after friendster.com. The only difference is that they’re used for pets. However, it’s safe to say that the creators of dogster.com and catster.com knew what they were doing when they choose domain names with ’ster’ at the end to cash in on the success of friendster.com. Now some of you might be worried that it’s possible you could run into legal trouble for purchasing domain names with this practice in mind; however, as you can see from the above examples they’re different enough that there have been no lawsuits filed yet close enough to cash in off the previously established successful brand.

What are some other examples you’ve seen? Do you believe this is a good way to get a kick start to the branding of your website?

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‘How often should I blog?’ is a question we’ve all thought about and I believe is one of the most important questions to address. In the past year of reading numerous other blogs, I’ve come accross this discussion and it’s various forms so many times that I’ve lost count. But what I believe all these posts on the topic have done is to create the false sense that what they advise you do is the best and only way to approach blogging.

Find what works for you

I believe that it’s more important to determine what’s the best level of posting frequency for you than to listen to some person tell you how much you have to blog. Let’s take physical trainers as an example: Do you honestly believe they approach each and every client the same way and offer the same advice and excercises every time? Of course not! They develop a strategy specifically for that client based on various factors such as current physical condition (how long have you been blogging) and the amount of time you have dedicated to work out (time in the day to blog). But one thing is for sure, physical trainers give you a schedule to stick to that is designed to give you maximum results. This idea can be applied to the categories of posting frequency in the same way:

Daily Posting

Readers visit your blog on a daily basis because they know what to expect - one post everyday. I have several blogs in my RSS reader that post daily and I enjoy the fact that every morning I check my RSS reader and I get to see what they have to say. This consistent blogging schedule works great for those that can keep it up, but this is a huge time commitment for the blogger. Don’t try and commit to a daily blogging schedule if you know you don’t have the time for it because eventually this will show in your writing. If you do decide to post daily then I would highly recommend that you use the wordpress time stamp feature to ensure you have a post ready in advance.

Three to Four Posts a Week

This is the category I fit into along with most of the other blogs in my RSS reader. I do my best to blog every other day; however, I mainly just try to make sure I post about 3 to 4 times a week. Occasionally I’ll write a couple posts back to back and follow up with another post two days later, but the main focus is to make sure that the gaps aren’t too far between each post. What I do like the most about blogging in this category is that fact that I never feel a constant pressure to blog, which is really good for me considering I work a full time job and have a long commute as well. If I did have this constant pressure to churn out a post every day than I believe the quality of my content could possibly suffer. Likewise, readers don’t really have a set expectation as to when they’ll see a post if you have already established that you blog about 3 to 4 times per week because they’ve seen your posting frequency on your blog before and if they’re still reading your posts they’re fine with it.

Once a Week Blogging

The only way I believe this category of posting can work is if you write very lengthy and incredibly useful posts on a consistent scheduled basis. If you post once a week every Friday (or some other day of the week) I believe it could work for you. But if you are inconsistent on the day you post you could severely limit your success. I believe there is significantly less “wiggle room” when it comes to your posting frequency if you are already only posting once a week.

Anything beyond these levels of posting frequency and I think it’s time for you to start writing more frequently, but if you feel inclined to post a couple times a month on an inconsistent basis and still manage to obtain readers I’d love to hear from you.

Wrapping it up

I want to reiterate that in the quest to maximize blogging effectiveness it is important to establish some form of a blogging schedule. You have to decide on whether this schedule will be on a daily basis or less. Now I don’t believe your blogging schedule has to be completely rigid, but readers come to expect a flow of content based on your past posting behavior and if you don’t meet those expectations you may lose some readers. Although I believe the loss of readers due to an inconsistent posting schedule has been over exagerated by many bloggers it is still an important factor to consider when deciding how often you will blog. In the end, I believe that if someone truly loves your blog’s content they won’t unsubscribe simply because you don’t post for a few days. If they’re that fickle, then they are probably just as likely to unsubscribe to your blog just for reading a post they don’t like.

So now that you’ve read my ideas, how about sharing some of yours? How often do you blog?

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I spent about 30 - 45 minutes a couple nights ago stumbling accross the Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Weblogs and Video Games categories. I’ve never really used the website that much due to time constraints, but I actually ended up having a lot of fun. However, one thing I noticed is that after a while I realized something, when I stumble upon websites I was frequently deciding on whether or not to scroll down simply based on the look of the website. Is this a superficial way to view websites? Yes. Is this what forces some stumble upon visitors away from your website? Yes.

When I see a design that looks like it’s coming out of the late 90’s or just barely entering the new millenium I think to myself, “I don’t have a lot of time to invest finding new websites so I’m not going to bother looking at this one.” lol… Now granted, sometimes I’ll stick around to let the title try and convince me it’s worth reading but having a poor and/or outdated design makes me want to click the stumble button again to check out something else and I’m sure other people think the same leads to a higher bounce rate for stumblers in my opinion.

I know this is a short post, but I’d like to hear some feedback about how you use StumbleUpon:

As a webmaster or blogger, do you believe your poor website design leads to a higher bounce rate for Stumblers?

As a reader do you judge a book by it’s cover?

Let me know what you think and feel free to check out my stumble upon profile and add me to your friends list.

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How many times have you seen “MMO” in a blog’s tagline? No, I’m not talking about a massively multiplayer online game, I’m referring to that ubiquitous phrase “Make Money Online”. This phrase popularized by JohnChow was a great tagline for his blog. You immediately knew what the blog was all about and considered him an authority on the topic especially after reading a monthly blog earnings post (Last month it was around $30k).

Now what do you think when you arrive at another blog, and see that same blog tagline Make Money Online? For me, my knee-jerk reaction is to ask these bloggers where is your creativity? I think to myself, “Great another MMO blog, I doubt this person has ever made money online.” Already a skeptic, I then give the blog a paragraph or two to prove some value as they already have to fight an uphill battle to convince me they’re worth the time to read.

Either way this MMO additiction has got to stop. Just look at the number of MMO blogs on EntreCard. This category comes second only to the personal diary category:

Numerous bloggers have expressed their disgust with this MMO phrase, but no one has offered any help for those of you still addicted to MMO. To help you out I’ve created a list of 21 ways to avoid saying Make Money Online:

1. Building my wealth without getting a job
2. Paying the bills one click at a time
3. Earning a living off websites
4. Generating wealth off websites
5. Paying the rent without leaving my chair
6. Forging an empire one site at a time
7. Monetization strategies that work
8. Making that cheddar by blogging
9. Learn to pull down profits by blogging
10. Work less and start blogging online
11. They call me the baker with how much dough I earn online.
12. Skills to pay the bills (Someone already has that one I think)
12. Rolling in dough created on the net
13. Raking in the cash off the www
14. Making money like it grows on trees
15. Padding my wallet with contextual ads
16. Living large off website income
17. Earn a killing armed with only a laptop
18. Creating wealth on the world wide web
19. Hit the jackpot without visiting the velvet table
20. Producing wealth off web properties
21. Be your own boss by earning a living on the web

I thought of these Make Money Online alternatives in about 30 minutes with a little help from a thesaurus. Several of the phrases I wrote as a joke, but some of them aren’t too bad. Now just think if you spent 30 minutes on coming up with just one unique blog tagline instead of following the MMO masses? I guarantee if you remove the Make Money Online blog tagline and replace it with something else you’ll see an increase in the amount of time people stay on your blog and an increase in traffic too. I’m not the only one that wants to hit back on my browser as soon as I see another MMO blog.

That’s the end of my rant, now I’m off to play some WoW…

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Applying for new publisher and affiliate programs can be a pain. You have to fill out the same information you did for the last publisher program you applied for and then often times you must send in a fax too. Often times they won’t even let you just email the W9 form because it must be faxed.

Now let’s be honest, fax machines suck. I’m just going to come right out and say that I hate them. My wife and I only have cell phones because we don’t see the need to pay an extra $20 a month for a home phone line when people can simply dial the person they want to speak with. Anyway, the last time I was required to fax in my W9 form for a publisher program was last month for Vibrant Media (intellitxt) and I didn’t want to stop at Kinko’s or my parents house to send a simple fax out. So being the lazy person that I found a website that allows you to send a fax for free and this was what I found:

FaxZero.com

The free fax comes with ads on the cover page but who cares as long as the fax reaches it’s destination? So what I did to sign my documents was simply open the pdf into photoshop and pull out the pencil tool and use my mouse. Using my mouse to write a signature doesn’t look that good and the date looks like it was written by a first grader but it doesn’t matter as long as I don’t have to go find a fax machine.

I have already verified that this site works and am about to fax off my W9 form to an affiliate program now.

Be honest, how many of you haven’t tried doing this before?

Side note: I wasn’t paid to write this review. I just thought this website would help you save some time.

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As a part time webmaster, you only have a certain amount of hours you can spend on the web building your business so it’s really important to focus the time you have to work on your websites that have the most potential to pay off. Why start a bunch of little websites that take up your time and can ultimately lead to spreading yourself too thin? I asked myself this question when I took some time to look at the websites still hosted on my old shared account. Why did I even bother creating these websites?

Nearly a year ago when I got into buying domains and websites on NamePros.com I bought a little flash arcade site (I was making such terrible money at my previous job the $10 arcade was about all I could afford at the time. My thought behind the purchase was that I’d simply put little affiliate buttons on the side of all my video game based sites and use that traffic to make a little extra money off the arcade. Unfortunately, what I didn’t count on was the time it would take for me to set up the website, get it transferred from the seller and place all of the buttons on my websites. And when I transfer this arcade to the new owner the total work will probably come out to about 4 hours or more. All this work for only $8.25 via Adsense for the website’s 9 months of operation. Looking back, was it really worth the time to take the time to deal with transferring the site from the seller, learn how to use the new arcade script, apply and put arcade banner exchange buttons onto the site and now to transfer it to the new owner? It really wasn’t worth the time and so this is why I recently decided to liquidate some of my really small sites that have not made me any money and just sit there reminding me of the time I wasted on low priority items.

As a part time webmaster it’s important to focus on continually driving more traffic to your primary sites that are already set up and optimized and other sites that show great growth potential. Don’t spend your time working on sites that already have a preset limited potential cap like a sub par arcade script site that can be found anywhere else on the web. If you find yourself working on new websites and the extra work load prevents you from providing the same amount of focus required to maintain your primary websites you have a problem. This is a mistake that I am focused on avoiding in the future; however, I hope some of you bloggers, forum admins and website owners will learn from my mistake.

Have you ever spent a lot of time on a website that showed little promise for growth and success? Or allowed the time you spent on a new website to take too much focus away from your key moneymakers?

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When I noticed my Adsense earnings slowly drop over the past 6 months I decided that it’s time for me to try out new ad programs and mix in new ones. So I have been seeking out alternatives to Adsense that can payout well and possibly replace Adsense if it continues to perform poorly. Besides, the same principles that apply to investing apply to monetizing your websites. It’s important to diversify!

I’ve tried Yahoo publisher network and terrible targetting and equally terrible results only to switch back to Adsense a month later. I’ve even tried out a smaller niche publisher network called ApexGamingAds to no avail. Lately I’ve been using AdBrite on one of my forums and am interested to see how they turn out, but my initial results haven’t been amazing. The next couple ad networks I’m going to test our are Bidvertiser and CasaleMedia. Another avenue I’m looking towards is private advertising as well, which I believe can be one of the biggest money makers if you can find advertisers that are looking to target your niche. I’ve already sold a couple of ads on my World of Warcraft Forum that made more than twice as much as Adsense did for the month and I didn’t even have an “advertise” page up.

At the start of next month I expect to switch over an entire forum to another publishing program in an effort to get some data that I’ll share with all of you here, and provided detailed stats for your viewing pleasure. Besides, it’s always good to find ways to make more money by utilizing different publisher programs.

Besides looking for replacements to my Adsense units that run on nearly every forum I have, over the past several months I’ve also been focusing on complementing my earnings with programs that can easily stack on top of other ad programs without the need to sacrifice a whole lot of extra ad space. One of these main complementary ad networks I’ve been using a lot on almost all of my forums is text-link-ads which has been a nice extra boost to my earnings for no work. And I’ve sold a least one ad on nearly every site I own, but again it’s not really something that replaces the ad space I’ve previously reserved for Adsense. I still recommend you use TLA on your websites as I continue to see success with them. I’ve also been using Kontera for about six months on my largest forum but haven’t had the best results so today I applied for Vibrant Media and intend to try out their program instead.

What have you tried doing to reduce your reliance on one advertising program? Click here to see what programs I recommend.

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