Creating a Buzz-worthy Blog Contest in 7 Easy Steps

One way to bait for links is a blog contest. If you do the contest right, even the most un-sexy of products (like stationery) can become sexy, creating a buzz that can drive a torrent of search traffic to your virtual doorstep. Consider for example the contest we (Netconcepts) dreamed up for the overnight printer of stationery and business cards OvernightPrints.com that I mentioned a few posts back (“Hiring a Link Builder“). The contest was to design Internet celebrity and Technorati Top 100 blogger Jeremy Schoemaker’s business card and you could potentially win business cards for life.

Here’s the winner, which is an awesome business card IMO:

Let’s take a closer look at what made this blog contest a successful link building strategy:

1. Come up with an impressive prize (or at least one that sounds impressive). In the above, the prize was a lifetime supply of business cards. A “lifetime supply” of anything sounds impressive. You can use the fine print to put some limits on it — like OvernightPrints.com did by capping it at 1000 business cards per year for a maximum of 20 years. That adds up to, well, peanuts.
2. Get a partner with some name recognition who’s willing to promote your contest. If you’re a blogger, try to land a partner organization that you can piggyback off of their brand recognition. If you’re a brand, get a well-known blogger to partner with you. Jeremy Schoemaker was great; he has a massive following. Ride on the coattails of that partner’s brand by enlisting their help in spreading the word about the contest. They need to be willing to hawk your contest on their blog and in social media. Jeremy posted multiple blog posts (with good keyword-rich links) and a YouTube video and some tweets on Twitter, for example. (Thanks Shoe!)
3. Promote the heck out of the contest yourself too. Don’t just rely on your partners to do it for you. With the above contest, we reached out to a bunch of design sites. And they took the bait. They loved the contest and promoted it to their community and linked to our contest page. What a great thing to add to your resume if you’re a designer, that you came up with the winning design of the business card for a famous blogger — out of over 400 entries no less!
4. Make sure the contest entry pages lives on your site. Not on your partner’s. You want the link juice flowing directly to the site you are looking to promote in the search engines. As you might guess, the contest entry page was on OvernightPrints.com, not on Shoemoney.com or anywhere else.
5. Keep it simple. There are numerous ways to run(ruin) a blog contest. If you want it to be a success, create a contest that is easy for users to participate in. People online are lazy and impatient — even if they aren’t like that in the real world (Something about being in front of the computer triggers it!). So, the more effort a contest requires, the lower the participation level. OvernightPrints.com kept it simple: “Design ShoeMoney’s business card”.. and win a lifetime supply of business cards.
6. Make it relevant to your business and to your targeted search term. It wouldn’t have made any sense for OvernightPrints.com to run a contest where you write a letter to the President and win a trip to Washington DC. For Overnight Prints, their money term is “business cards”. Being on page 1 in Google for that term is worth big bucks to Overnight Prints. This contest moved them onto page 1, and in fact, onto the top half of page 1.
7. Involve the community. Jeremy narrowed it down to 7 finalists and then asked his readers to help him decide. The participation factor is huge. It makes the blog’s readers much more invested in the outcome.

A good contest has synergy — it’s a win-win for all parties (blogger, brand, contestants, readers) and having the right partners means that overall the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. everyone does much better than if they had embarked on it individually). Yes this contest was a huge success for everybody involved. Of course OvernightPrints was the biggest winner of them all: they got relevant exposure, buzz, links, rankings and traffic. Use the above 7 step formula and hopefully you will have similar success yourself.

Who Is Stephan Spencer: Web Marketer

Hi, I’m Stephan Spencer. Here’s a little treatise on me.

First off, I’m the President & CEO of Netconcepts, a natural search marketing firm with offices in Madison Wisconsin, Auckland New Zealand, and Beijing in China. In addition to SEO consulting, we have a search engine optimization (SEO) technology platform that helps online retailers optimize landing pages for natural search. Our clients include Gorton’s, Cabela’s, Verizon, REI, InfoSpace, Kohl’s, The Sharper Image, Wella, Hanes Brands (Sara Lee Direct), the American Marketing Association (MarketingPower.com), and MP3.com, to name-drop a few.

We at Netconcepts hold dear to our hearts the principle of ethical business relationships. We are happy to teach clients how to fish, disclosing exactly how to achieve top search engine rankings in extensive audit reports and day-long on-site training workshops.

My passions include search engine marketing & technology, web best practices & standards, web usability, web marketing & strategy, email marketing & strategy, and online retailing.

I started Netconcepts in early 1995 and grew it from a one-person consultancy to a multi-national agency, with its headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin and production offices in New Zealand (a.k.a. “Middle Earth”).

Prior to founding Netconcepts, I was a PhD student in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (a great school, I might add). In 1994, I decided to ride the Internet wave to riches and early retirement (hmm… I’m still working! What does that say?) and dropped out of my PhD program but stuck it out the few extra months required to walk away with a Master’s. In January 1995, with no capital, a family of five to support, and no formal university training in management or marketing, I struck out on my own. What the hell was I thinking, you might ask? It’s been a wild ride, and in the process I managed to “bootstrap” a pretty cool interactive marketing company.

In 1999 I moved from Wisconsin to New Zealand with my daughters and wife (now ex). Within three months I had the New Zealand production office up and running. After a short stint in downtown Auckland, I decided on Browns Bay on the North Shore for the New Zealand office. Browns Bay featured everything a staff would want in a job location — cafes, retail shops, and of course the beach (which is only one block away). Plus, it eliminates the need to fight the Auckland city traffic.

After residing in New Zealand for nearly eight years, my family and I moved back to Madison. It’s been a fabulous adventure being in New Zealand, but now it’s great to be back in my homeland.

I still rack up the frequent flyer miles, but now it’s mostly domestic flights to present at various conferences. Since 1995, I’ve presented at literally hundreds of Internet conferences and symposia around the world, including London, Berlin, Santiago, Auckland, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, and yes, even Appleton.

I, along with my co-authors Rand Fishkin, Eric Enge, and Jessie Stricchiola, authored the book The Art of SEO published by O’Reilly (my all-time favorite book publisher!). I authored numerous articles to publications such as Multichannel Merchant, DM News, Catalog Success, Search Engine Land, Catalog Age, MarketingProfs, Building Online Business, Unlimited, and NZ Marketing, which gives me something constructive to do while on the plane. I also co-authored Catalog Age’s research report “State of Search Engine Marketing 1.0″ with my VP of Search, Brian Klais.