Blogging is a great platform for promoting a business, and one of the best ways to gain ultra-cheap online exposure is through a blog promotion or competition. With a reasonable amount of blog traffic and a proactive audience, it is possible to put your business in front of thousands, sometimes even tens-of-thousands of eyes, all with a simple special offer or potential prize.
Of course, running a blog competition is not as simple as posting what you want people to do. While there aren’t any rules, there are “best practices” that you should stick to. Whether you want to boost orders, increase your reader count, or simply gain new traffic for your marketing websites, these strategies are unlikely to fail you.
1) Incorporate Social Media
If you do not mind stretching the definition slightly, blogs are social media. However, while blogs offer the same connective features as other social media platforms, they lack the depth of a medium like Facebook or Twitter.
When you are piecing together your blog promotion strategy, incorporate social media platforms that allow a message to spread quickly. If your message can be summarized in 140 characters, make it a promotion that works effectively on Twitter. If it can travel through already established relationships, make it something that travels via Facebook. Running a great blog-based promotion is not just about attracting other bloggers, but about supporting your blog message with other promotional outlets.
2) Explain it in one sentence.
The kiss of death for any promotion is complexity. Whether it is a simple discount offer or a competition, the driving force behind promotional success is simplicity. If you can’t explain your promotion in one sentence, it is unlikely your audience will be able to, and as a result your message will fail to spread.
Remember, you should be designing your blog promotion with social media in mind. The vast majority of social media platforms favor short, snappy messages that don’t require excessive explanation. Craft a promotion that is easy to explain, not just easy to take part in.
3) Encourage other bloggers to spread the word.
The most successful blog promotions do not necessarily offer the best deals of feature the best prizes. Sometimes it is less about what is on offer, and much more about how it is offered. When you are creating a plan for your blog promotion, get in touch with other bloggers and let them know when it is going ahead.
Even a few small supporting blog posts can go a long way, not just from a direct promotional standpoint, but from an SEO standpoint. Every extra post, whether directly effective or not, is another link back to you, and every effective post is another source for direct, scalable promotion.
4) Make it relevant to your blog.
The most effective promotions offer something that can’t be found anywhere else. Successful businesspeople offer free consulting, authors and artists offer one-on-one interviews and lunches, and marketers offer potential marketing collaborations. Your promotion should not just be about attracting attention with a discount code or a free prize, it should be about bringing attention to your blog for the unique value that it can offer.