Jane May Blogs

There are many great ways to build traffic to your web site and engage your readers. A couple that never fail are promotions and give-aways.  Everyone loves getting free things for nothing so here are some ideas you can implement:

• Create a contest on your web site and give away $25-$50 value in gifts to the winner(s).  John Chow does this very well and he tends to give away very nice prizes like a Nintendo Wii and Zune MP3 player.  He has also raffled off promotional pens which I was lucky enough to win once
• Create a promotion where every certain commentator wins a prize or free advertising on your site. If your web site is still young and doesn’t get much traffic, it is always better to bribe people with monetary prizes. The promotion can be something like “every 25th comment wins X”. This encourages reader participation which can make your web site appear more popular thereby gathering more traffic. You can also include a Top Commentator list and remove the No Follow code so people are rewarded for leaving comments.
• Create a creative way for people to enter your contest by somehow incorporating a backlink to your site with your prefered anchor text.  You can even tell them exactly what you want written so they literally have to do no thinking and can paste your exact words. If you would like a lot of people participating, be sure the prize is worth their while. Even though it is easy to post a backlink on someone’s web site, they do not want to link to poor quality sites, or if the contest is not worth them writing about.

Have you guys run any successful promotions and give-aways that have attracted a lot of new traffic?