In my latest Traffic Analysis, I mentioned that my highest viewed post in September was My first blog contest, a post I promoted heavily while the contest was running. I’m very pleased with the statistics and, as I promised, I’d like to share the methods I used as well as show off some of the results.

Promotion Techniques

I’m going to list the places I promoted my contest, as well as some short details about how to make the most out of them, so that you can try them out for yourself.

On DotComDud.com - I added a highlighted reminder at the top of the blog (right underneath the header). So that every time a visitor viewed any page on DotComDud.com they would see the reminder, which linked directly to the contest. I also posted a reminder near the end of the contest, to keep the buzz going. This made sure that anytime during the contest that anyone was on DotComDud.com, that knew about the 1K Entrecard Giveaway!

Entrecard - I changed my Entrecard image from the usual DotComDud logo (that can be currently seen on my Entrecard profile) to the Entrecard shown below. I created it specifically to bring attention to my contest and get visits from users who normally wouldn’t visit DotComDud.com (or who have visited it before from the usual Entrecard) but might be more interested when there are prizes to be won.

At Other Contests - I entered other contests that were running on similar blogs and then left a comment letting them know about my contest. Not only did the blog owner often enter the contest in reciprication but some of their readers checked out my contest as well.

Contest Blogs - My contest was listed on Webby Contest, a blog all about contests, so if you are running a contest of your own make sure you let Webby Contest know about it! There are a lot of these contest blogs popping up lately, so check them out as they are a perfect target if you are looking for people to enter your contest.

Forums - I made a few forum posts promoting my contest. The best results came from Bloggeries & the Entrecard forums, where there is a forum dedicated to promoting your contests.

StumbleUpon - I also got the post Stumbled which brought me some pretty good traffic too.

The Contest Itself - As part of the contest rules, if anyone made a post about the contest on their own blog then they got extra chances to win. A couple of people took advantage of this and it got me some back-links and a bit of extra traffic.

The Results

As you can see in the September Traffic Analysis, the contest got 10 times the amount of traffic as the next most popular post. It also became the most commented post on DotComDud.com and brought in a few quality back-links too!

My main goal though was to get more RSS subscribers, which up until that point hadn’t been doing very well. On August 31st, the day before the contest was announced, I only had 5 subscribers (the blog had been running for 10 days). When the winners were announced on September 17th, the number of RSS subscribers had increased to 24! That is an increase of 19 subscribers in just over 2 weeks. It might not be a huge number but for a new blog, these are pleasing results. DotComDud.com had almost 5 times as many subscribers afterwards than it did when the contest started!

So, with the success of the first contest on DotComDud.com, I think it is time I had another one. So stay tuned as I’ll be working on getting some better prizes this time around and will hopefully be announcing the 2nd ever DotComDud.com contest sometime next week!