10e20 Blog

Contests, especially user-generated ones, have the ability to drive significant traffic and links to a site. For example, there are many sites like Contest Hound and Contest Blogger, that share information about various available contests. Many participants connect with contest for the following reasons:

• Win a prize (monetary or material)
  
• Recognition
• Connect with the brand
  

In order for people to connect with a contest, the concept needs to be relevant to the target audience’s interests. Issue-based organizations have been extremely successful at drawing many participants and encouraging feedback, regardless of the prize. However, consumer goods struggle with contests, especially if the rewards are nominal.

Wells Fargo, the financial services company, is offering a contest that encourages users to submit a story of what they would accomplish if they had a certain amount of money. Some Day Stories is rewarding the winner with $100,000.

OK – this is for all you hungry and good-hearted SEOs out there. If you want to get a chance to do the following:

1. Win a free ticket to Danny Sullivan’s upcoming SMX conference ($1395 value)
   
   
2. Win a free seat in Bruce Clay’s SEO Training ($1450) and Advanced Certification course ($995)
   
3. Help a non-profit organizations succeed on the Internet
   
4. Win fame in the SEO industry as a good SEO and all-around nice person
   
5. Win one of these fancy shirts donated by Graywolf (not sure about this part)

If 1-4 sound appealing to you then quickly head on over Bruce Clay’s new SEO Contest: Help People, Get Training, Go to SMX and get involved.

Back in June, BetUS.com came up with a great idea – Put Your Money Where Your Blog Is in which people were able to place bets on who they thought would end the year at the top of Technorati’s Top 100 List. This was a brilliant peice of viral marketing that resulted in a lot of buzz and a lot of really good links. The beauty of this went beyond the links because it got a lot of new people to sign up and bet on something that they could relate to. It went beyond link bait for the sake of links.

When this contest started:

Technorati.com (a blog search engine) says that there are over 37.3 million blogs in the blog universe (or blogosphere as it’s collectively known as).

Currently they are tracking over 63.2 million blogs.

Here were the original odds: