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8 Rules for Creating an Effective Blog Contest

Written by Brandon on February 13, 2008 – 6:41 am -

I have recently experimented with a number of Blog Contests for my site DesignCrack.com, and I’ve come away with a mixed experience on the effectiveness of blog contests. By the way, I think contests work really, really well to the point of being essential for building blog traffic. But, building an effective blog contest will first have to pass through a few questions.

Winning the race

Why would you want to run a blog contest?

The Wrong Answer: To get a massive quick traffic burst.
The Right Answer: To get a sustainable stream of people continually checking your site. Quick traffic bursts are like Britney Spears whereas a sustainable stream of people is more like the Beatles. That is to say, the sustainable stream actually has meaning and substance that affect their lives and keep them coming back for more where a quick traffic burst is fluff that becomes easily forgetable.

The Wrong Answer: To get more people signed up on the email newsletter. Although this is a nice bonus, it is not as helpful to your site as the right answer.
The Right Answer: To get more people actively participating in your site. I think a lot of bloggers are really looking at the short term goal getting people signed up. The signing up will come, but I suggest focusing on the end goal which should be to create something of strong value for the user by making their participation conclude with something for them.

running the race

by thomas_sly

How would you want to run a blog contest? Using the two tenets that I’ve set up above, I’ve developed a list of rules to follow when creating a contest that always refer back to the tenets.

First, Find what it is that you are passionate about that a broad group of people are also extremely passionate about. For instance, I’ve made street art for years such as stickers and stencils. It turns out that there is a vast worldwide network of sticker enthusiasts who are passionate about what they do. I run a product design website, though. People are passionate about product design, but the barrier of entry for product design is high, so the number of people who are passionate and would participate in a design contest is far smaller than the number of people who are street art enthusiasts. So, I’ve tweaked my contest to incorporate this larger audience without completely losing focus on design.
Second, make sure the contest is about something with substance. If you do a contest where you randomly select a winner of a prize for signing up for your newsletter, say, this won’t really drive people to tell other people about your site. If you run a contest where you ask people to submit their art works, people will respond and they will tell their friends to enter, first because people respond better to challenges rather than bribes, second because competing with people you know seems to be a human trait. Also, making a contest with substance drives people to create items of value for themselves even if they don’t win the contest. So, if you were to create a piece of art for a contest you now have another item for your portfolio. If you win the contest, you have something for your resume.
Third, unless you are a well known authority, don’t make the barrier of participation too high. That is, make it relatively easy for people to enter and feel good about what they’ve contributed. For instance, if you were to run a design competition, you may want people to design a T-shirt instead of designing a piece of complex architecture. Nobody is going to spend the time designing a whole building unless you are a major publication like Architectural Record.
Fourth, really think about who the audience for the contest is and pursue them vigorously where they congregate. Back to the art contest as an example. It turns out that there are tens of thousands of people who are members of street art groups on Flickr. In these groups, they share photos of their work and others work. So, if you were to only send out the contest announcement to your email newsletter alone, you might end up with zero entries. If you create a Flickr group for the contest, and then announce the contest to every art group and major contributors to those groups then you will be well on your way to creating a phenomenon. My current Fickr contest, for instance, has received 50 entries in 24 hours and will surely see exponential growth over the next few days because Flickr is the place to be for this contest and my site is not. However, you can easily link back to your site from the contest site.
Fifth, never pay for a prize. This is something you will never ever have to do. You want to cross promote your blog and partner with someone. So, let’s say a PR person wants you to write a review of their art book for your blog. Ask for two copies. One to review and one to give away as a contest prize. Run a contest related to the book’s subject. This will make the PR person happy because they will get great exposure without a lot of work, and you get to offer cool free stuff in exchange for interacting with your site. If you don’t get that kind of offer, then approach the PR person first. They will often oblige with lots of free stuff.
Sixth, consider having the audience be the judge of the contest. Having the audience judge can create a firestorm of activity for your site because when a person enters the contest, they will surely notify all of their friends to vote for their work. Yes, this degrades the contest to be based on popularity, but that’s why you might have a people’s choice award as well as a judge’s award. This will maintain the impartiality the participants crave and still allow for a popularity contest to exist on the side.
Seventh, give props to as many participants as you can. Let’s say you have 100 entries and only one prize to give away. Then I would suggest making 19 “verbal prizes” as well as one grand prize. The verbal prizes are where you call out a person’s design for a particularly wonderful trait without actually giving them the prize. Even the acknowledgement of a job well done will keep people coming back for future contests.
Eighth, thank everyone profusely for participating and bait them with the next competition. Anyone that’s going to spend the time to enter your contest needs some sort of recognition even if it’s thanking everyone. Don’t forget to do this.

Next week, I will cover specific techniques and technology you can use to build a strong blog contest.

Tags: blogging, contests, flickr, groups
Posted in Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic | No Comments »

Essential Wordpress Plugins: Google XML Sitemaps

Written by Brandon on February 3, 2008 – 7:15 am -

One of the first key items that builds traffic to your Wordpress blog is to have the major search engines index your web pages. It may seem as simple as writing pages and the search engines will find you, but there is so much more to the nuances of search engine visibility. Google, for instance, allows you to build a sitemap that reports the title and location of each web page of your site directly to Google on a daily basis. Fortunately for Wordpress users, there is a powerful Google sitemap plugin that you can install that will almost immediately increase your traffic by drastic amounts. This plugin is aptly called: Google XML sitemaps. The XML in the name refers to the data format which is the standard for all Google sitemaps. But fortunately for less technical people, you don’t need to know what XML is or how this data format works. You simply have to install the Wordpress plugin and report the plugin to Google. Here’s a more detailed explanation of the process:

First, download the Google XML Sitemaps.
Then, upload the plugin into your plugins folder on your site as you normally would. More detailed instructions can be found HERE.
Configure the plugin and generate the sitemap. There are tons of options on the sitemap. Most of the sitemap options you don’t need to touch, but I’d read through the options anyway.
Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. These tools allow you to point your sitemap directly at Google which assures they will index new content. Webmaster tools also does so much more such as tell you what the most popular search terms for your site are, which in turn help you decide what type of content to focus on. You will need to prove to Google that the site you are adding a sitemap to is actually yours by adding a line of code to your template, but the setup is relatively painless.

Admittedly, these steps can be complicated for someone who is completely non-technical, but the traffic increas you will experience is going to be great which will hopefully build your revenue.

Tags: Google, search engine optimization, SEO, sitemaps, webmaster
Posted in Building Web Traffic, SEO, wordpress | No Comments »

Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins

Written by Brandon on January 28, 2008 – 5:45 am -

I know you’ve heard this story before: “Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins”, but a few recently created plugins for Wordpress have really opened the floodgate for creating rapid, wealth generating blogging businesses. But before I get into the nuts and bolts of the business model, I would first like to introduce you to a website currently using this business model: Trendhunter.com.

photo by Joe Shlabotnik

The Trendhunter Business Model

Trendhunter.com is essentially a multi-user blog where thousands of users have contributed articles to the site. According to my recent check at Alexa.com, Trendhunter is the 9th most popular design website on the internet The main focus of revenue for the site comes simply from the sheer volume of contributions which number in the dozens each day that are posted to the front page, and the ability of the contributors to promote their posts. How does owner, Jeremy Gutsche, get so many contributors?

He shares ad revenue with his users.
He encourages bloggers to promote their own content by contributing to Trendhunter.com
He edits each post that makes it to the front page which, unlike Digg.com, means only the most interesting trends make it. This helps maintain strong content quality that is on topic.
He promotes and encourages contributors to promote the site using web 2.0 tools such as blog widgets and old-school viral tools like emailing friends.

I believe that sharing the ad revenue is the strongest incentive for making such a popular blog because Mr. Gutsche makes it so easy to make extra money. How does he make it so easy? By making the ad sharing easy. All you have to do to make money is have a Google Adsense Account. When you sign up for Trendhunter.com, you are prompted to enter your AdSense code. Now, every article that you write that appears on Trendhunter.com will show your adsense ads, and any ads that are clicked on generates revenue for you. For most articles, only a dollar or two revenue is generated, but it is possible to generate up to $50 for articles that are viral and extremely popular. And, of course, the more popular the site and the more articles you write means the more money you make. All of this along with the collective power of all the other people on the site wanting to make money means explosive expansion once the site has built some popularity.

Although Trendhunter.com has developed really strong growth and requires a very small staff which has developed a relatively low impact revenue stream, there are some areas which Trendhunter.com could improve. I want to focus exclusively on rapid content generation, though, which is essentially the heart of Trendhunter.com’s business. So, how do you add content currently to the site? You have to go through a fairly excruciating process that involves filling out a half-dozen text fields minimum and tab through 4 tabbed pages. At any given time during this process, if you accidentally click on the wrong link surrounding the entry form and you’ve lost your data.

Adding the Tumblr Method of Rapid Content Creation

Trendhunter.com’s content creation could be so much more fun and easy if there were some sort of bookmarklet that you could add to your toolbar, so whenever you’re at some website you want to write about you could push a button, write a few sentences, and boom! your post is done. Enter the Tumblr.com Bookmarklet. This bookmarklet lets you press a button, and all the images pop up on a new screen. Then, you can choose an image, write a couple of sentences, and hit “post”.

A quick comparison of the Tumblr.com content work flow versus the Trendhunter.com content work flow reveals that the same quality post can be created with the tumblr bookmarklet method in 25% of the time it takes to create a Trendhunter post. The work flow savings you get with tumblr.com are:

automatic uploading of images and videos
10-20 less clicks needed per article, which saves your hands
more incentive to write an article because it only requires one click on the tool bar
quotes can be added by simply highlighting the desired text you want to quote.

Trendhunter.com would surely benefit from adopting this model, and the Trendhunter tool bar that already exists seems ripe for including this in their development schedule. But if you are as ambitious and motivated as Jeremy Gutsche, you may be able to beat him to the punch by creating an even more effective and simpler version of Trendhunter.com using Wordpress and a number of simple to implement plugins.

So, what are these plugins that can make Wordpress as popular and powerful as Trendhunter.com? We should start by analyzing what Wordpress is missing that Trendhunter has:

First, Trendhunter has a stronger user customization, so Wordpress needs a plugin that allows users to add a photo of themselves, add their Adsense information, and add whatever other information you care to follow. To fill this gap, I use the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin which allows you to add any number of extra fields to your users’ profiles. More importantly, you can also recall the information in these fields using the Cimy template tag. For instance, if a user provides his Adsense account number, then I can put this account number into any post that this person writes using a small amount of PHP code. This guarantees that the writer will get all ad credit for his posts.
Second, Trendhunter gives each contributer his own sort of miniblog within the overall site. This miniblog includes an image of the person, the contributor’s stats, as well as the person’s own URL which he can send to friends. Again, all of this can be created using the simple template tags provided by the Cimy plugin.
Third, Trendhunter is missing a way to create posts quickly and easily. A new Wordpress plugin that recently became available that has proven incredibly powerful is the Quickpost plugin provided by twelvehorses. This plugin allows you to create posts very quickly. You can also offer this to your contributors and they can add posts equally quickly. This is the major advantage you would have over Trendhunter using Wordpress.
Fourth, Trendhunter gives readers ways to spread posts virally to other sites. You can accomplish the same things that Trendhunter offers with a couple of useful plugins. One is the Social Bookmark plugin which allows you to bookmark an article to any number of dozens of social bookmarking sites. The other plugin of note is the WP-email which allows readers to email an article to friends.

There are some definite advantages of using these Wordpress plugins, however, there are also some hurdles that you should be very aware of:

First, it’s not completely clear if you are following the Google Adsense terms of service agreement if you exchange out user ad accounts . This is because when you have a generic Adsense code where you substitute other authors’ Adsense account numbers this may be seen as altering the code. The Terms of Service says you are not supposed to alter this code in any way, however, I personally do not consider this violating the TOS because the end javascript code really is not altered than the intended code. I highly suggest reading about this and using this at your own risk. However, judging Trendhunter.com as a test case, using this method is acceptable as long as you do not alter the code in any way and just the account has changed.
Second, the Quickpost Plugin has a bug where you have to sign in before the plugin works. I’ve informed the plugin writers, but you may have to hire some outside help if this plugin becomes an essential part of your business.
Third, the Quickpost Plugin posts direcly to the site no matter what your user status is. That means contributors posts go live immediately without being approved by an editor. This, again can be quickly fixed by a competent Wordpress developer and a couple hundred dollars. You don’t necessarily have to offer the quickpost plugin to users, but it is so handy it’s hard not to offer this option. My suggestion is to only allow posts on the home page in a category no one would ever choose. This might deter getting unwanted posts on the home page.
Finally, the Cimy Extra Fields plugin can be very powerful yet tricky to set up with Adsense. You will want to consider writing a very well thought out conditional statement in PHP that assures that you have received a valid Adsense code. This is not for the amateur to attempt.

Overall, if you’re willing to try to learn from Trendhunter’s great strengths and shortcomings you may find yourself with dozens of contributors and ten times the traffic. If you need any help fleshing this out or need further instruction on implementing this feel free to leave a comment or email me at bbaunach@yahoo.com.

Tags: content, plugins, trendhnter, web2.0, wordpress
Posted in Adsense, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Experimental Techniques, Starting a Business | 1 Comment »

Building Blog Traffic: Optimizing for Google Image Search

Written by Brandon on January 4, 2008 – 5:15 am -

Here is something I noticed a year ago that completely blew me away: blogs that have lots of images get half or more of their search traffic from their images. This means if your images are not indexing on your image rich site, then you may be potentially missing an opportunity to double your search traffic. But, getting your images indexed by Google is a complete mystery even to the most seasoned webmasters as the forum chatter suggests. So, in the next few paragraphs I will help you figure out if your images are indexing on Google, and if they are not indexing then how you might get them indexed on Google, so you too can be well on your way to doubling your search traffic.

google image search costume

The geekiest Halloween costume ever: A Google Image Search (photo by Jacob Lodwick)

First, be aware that Google has a separate image crawler that crawls your site for images. You cannot include an image site map on your site telling Google when and where to find new images like you can for the written content. The image crawler just comes buy whenever it can which is not very often. Images are much more data intensive than text, so Google really takes its time getting around to your site. Also, if your site is slow, then the Google image crawler will skip over your site completely and not come back for a long, long time.

But before we get in too deep, let’s see if your images are indexing. It’s as simple as going to images.google.com and typing in “site:http://yoursite.com” ( replace yoursite.com with your blog’s own URL) . If no images come up then you’ve got a problem.

There are a few things you will need to do to make sure your images are indexing.

First, you should make sure that there is no meta tag in the head of your web page that tells the web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the tag.
Next, you should make sure that there is no line in your robots.txt file telling web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the line that excludes images. For more about robots.txt check out the links I’ve included.
Then, you will need to make sure each image has a very descriptive title attribute in the <img> tag. The title want to be very descriptive in 10 words or less.

If you have done all of this, and you’ve waited a few weeks for Google’s extremely slow crawler, then you have a much more difficult problem to troubleshoot. But, there is still hope! Chances are that your site is too slow for Google to efficiently crawl. I know it may seem OK to you, but to Google it is just too slow. What you are going to have to do next is speed up the delivery of the site to Google. I’ve found that the simplest and most effective technique is to cache the web pages. Caching pages is essentially a technique where your blog software creates a temporary copy of a web page that does not change too much so that the blog does not have to go back and forth to the database. Caching can dramatically speed up your site, and if your use a Wordpress blog, a there is a great caching plugin called WP-Cache that is a must for your site. After I installed the caching plugin for Wordpress on one of my own sites I very soon got major traffic from Google Images. I also tried turning it off and on for a few days at a time and found that there was a definite correlation with caching and the Google image crawler indexing my site.

If none of this works, then it may be time to start from scratch on another blog software that will guarantee image indexing. I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.

Finally, I want to point out an interesting way using Google Image Search to find out where you stand in blog domination. I run an interior design blog which is somewhat popular but no where close to the most popular design blogs such as mocoloco.com. I decided to see how I stood up to the big guys by doing a simple test to see how many images of chairs each of us had indexed. So I put in “site:designcrack.com/v2 chairs” and “site:mocoloco.com chairs” . What I had found is that I had a total of 120 different chair images which I thought was a very respectable amount of chair posts for little old me. But, mocoloco.com had a total of nearly 13,000 chair images to choose from. This immediately said to me that I will not be playing with the big blogs unless I make a full time commitment to my blogging craft. A couple of posts per day simply cannot compare.

Tags: blogging, google image search, image crawler, mocoloco.com, robot.txt
Posted in Analysis, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO | 2 Comments »

Blog Titles and Meta Data: What Benefit’s Do You Get from Optimization?

Written by Brandon on December 30, 2007 – 5:48 pm -

Back when I started my very first blog in 2004, I was not terribly happy with the amount of traffic I was getting from Google. I had set up my sitemap and done all of the things that I thought I should do. Then one day, I realized that I had never created meta data in the head of my blog template. After I changed this data to properly describe my site, I got double the amount of traffic from Google the very next day. Recently though, I’ve wondered how much optimizing meta data really matters on a site that is already popular. The answer I’ve come up with is it does not matter one bit. But before I tell you why it doesn’t matter, let’s get back to basics.

library card: An Early Form of Metadata

The Library Card: An Early Form of Metadata

If you don’t know what meta data is, then read this awesome article on searchenginewatch.com to get an understanding. In its simplest form, meta data is just data that quickly describes what is on a particular web page. This meta data can describe a number of things on your site, but for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on three tags found within the head of every web page: <meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> , <meta name=”description” content=”some description here” />, and <title>The title of the page</title>.

What each tag does is pretty self explanitory. Good Search Engine Optimization practice tell us that:

<title>The title of the page</title> = You would write a short title that might be the blog name and a less than one sentence description.

If you have small amounts of traffic, and you have not done what I’ve subscribed above, then you will double your traffic pretty quickly once you’ve done this.

Optimizing blog titles and meta data in Wordpress, for instance, becomes more tricky. You should consider getting one of the SEO plugins for wordpress that I list at the end of the article or visiting the Wordpress.org web page on SEO. Also, check out this link on Meta Tags in Wordpress. Remember that in a wordpress blog you have 4 types of pages that you have to optimize: the homepage, the archive, the single post, and the page. Rather than going on about this, let’s just say the end goal: Every page in your site should have different meta data tailored to that page. Most sites that have been lazy about meta data use the same meta data throughout the site and only change the titles. This is not what you want. You want to use Wordpress’ flexible Template Tags to build just the right data. (If you want more specifics, you’ll have to hire me).

If you remember at the beginning of the article, though, I said meta data does not matter one bit for very popular sites. Then why did I spend so much time on this subject? We’ll most sites aren’t really popular, so I think you’ll benefit from considering meta data on your site. But, how do I know that meta data isn’t all that important for popular sites? From an experiment I conducted in my blog sector. I write a design blog, so I took ten of the most popular design blogs as defined by Alexa, and I viewed their source to see what their meta data looked like. I thought I would find some meta data oracle that would show me the way to instant popularity, but I found the exact opposite. And, here is what I found:

None of the five blogs had any consistency with keywords or descriptions between them. They were all completely different even though the subject matter was quite similar.
A couple of the blogs did not have meta data at all. There was nothing to speak of to describe their data, and yet they remain amazingly popular.
Most of the blogs had no consistency between the home page meta data and the single post meta data.
One site even did not have meta data related to their subject and it seemed that it was a placeholder that was meant to be changed.

What should all this mean to you? There are other much more major areas where you should spend your time increasing traffic for your site. At the very least, you should definitely go to all the major search engines to see what your page results look like. If they quickly describe the results well, then you’re done. If they don’t describe what the page is about then go back to the boards immediately because either your title or your meta data needs work. Now, for a list of SEO Plugins: