I found this site via a link from John Chow, well a post about the site. MyBlogValue will give you a ‘fun’ estimation of your blog, it asks you 19 questions about your blog and then gives you a price.

I know this is just for fun and not meant to be taken major serious but what’s the point of it when it’s this inaccurate lol. It asks decent questions but then blabs out a figure from the sky, way over the top.

There are some pretty ludicrous evaluation sites / scripts out there but that’s just silly!

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A lot of people who obsessively read mock impersonator John Cow (for which I am not one to be honest) Are aware that Mr Cow recently put the blog up for sale. If I remember rightly he was asking in the region of $50k.

I think ‘Bob’ (blog owner’s real name… I think) Needed the money as he mentioned he’s moving to Australia so needed some quick funding. The site was listed on Sitepoint and put up on DP. Bob gave us the impression that it didn’t sell in a short follow up post about the sale; Saying numerous buyers had not followed through.

A little while after and I’m strangely suspicious given the sort of ‘new nature’ of the posts. Everything sort of seems normal and there has been no official announcement saying the blog has been sold (as far as I’m aware) But posts seem to be a little different.

I do glance through Cow’s posts on occasion as they can often be interesting / witty but lately I’m left with a strange feeling of unfamiliarity. Is it just me or does the recognizable writing style for which Cow was affiliated with seem to be… slightly missing.

As well as an odd feeling concerning a lack of the usual literary magic, there also seems to be more posts about advertising, more reviews, a few 125 ads available (unusual for Cow) and the blog seems to have lost a bit of the usual ‘fun’.

There are also slightly new structures to posts, with similar picture insertion cuttings, and the writing seems to be much more formal. I’m slightly inclined to the possibility that a new owner may be present, attempting to keep up the norm with rigorous cow puns every now n’ then.

Some times new owners of blogs with a definitive owner can be victims of odd, vigorous comment / blogesphere abuse. Can’t think of any off hand but I think there has been a few cases.

Anyone else conform to the notion that maybe Mr Cow has sneakily left our presence, allowing the new owner to take place discreetly?

John / Bob / New owner, if you read this, let us know!

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Putting an accurate price tag on your blog isn’t always easy but it is easy to get it wrong unless you know the basic principles on which to value a blog.

Different bloggers put different weight of worth of different factors which can determine what a blog is worth.

In general, we tend to over value our own blogs due to the fact that they’re our own. But just because we as the authors place so much value in what we believe is so amazing, doesn’t mean everyone else will or that it’s worth what we think it is.

Here I’ve written up what I believe to be the most logical, reasonable and easiest ways to come to a realistic financial value of your blog.

RSS Subscribers

To me, RSS subscribers of a blog is probably the single biggest factor in determining potential value. Even above revenue. How many RSS subscribers a blog has on a daily average indicates how many people like the content of the blog so much as to want to keep coming back.

There are, as many people know, ways to manipulate or deceive people into thinking the RSS number is higher. You can buy subscribers, you can grab an image of an RSS chicklet of a blog with 2,000 subscribers and place it on your own and at a glance the majority of people wouldn’t question it.

These techniques can help improve actual subscribers as people never like to be first, so if they think lots of other people have subscribed before them, they assume the content must be good on a regular basis and good enough for them to come back. So will usually subscribe as well. I however, would prefer to be completely genuine and honest with myself and actually see how people naturally subscribe without display of false statistics.

I don’t think enough bloggers put enough value on RSS subscribers when they go to value or sell their blog. As a blogger, your readers are your biggest asset and without them, even with traffic but no continuous readers. You don’t have a blog. You have a static resource. Which is fine, but the real value in a blog to me is the return factor. If people don’t even want to come back and get free content on a regular basis, assuming you give it, how much can your blog realistically be worth.

Monthly Revenue

A basic rule of thumb evaluation factor for basically all sites, not just blogs. Personally I don’t think the monthly revenue is AS important as the subscriber amount of a blog because monetization can be improved if the traffic is there, but if people aren’t even coming back… there’s a lot more work to be done.

Some people selling their blogs like to take the highest revenue figure they’ve achieved in revenue and put that as the monthly revenue. I think this is a little bit misleading as it gives the impression that’s regular. For monthly revenue you should be giving what the blog makes on average, every month. As in, it will make at least X amount. The easiest way to get an average is to take the highest and lowest earnings you’ve ever made in a month, then find the middle-ground.

If you do go to sell your blog, make sure you don’t lie about revenue as the buyer will eventually find out. Which won’t comeback to serve you well. Just be honest and give proof. People love screenshots, stats or any further form of proof that you can provide to absolutely clarify everything you are claiming. Makes the sale easier on both sides.

Quality Content

I think the amount of regular, unique, quality content is sometimes overlooked as a genuinely important evaluation factor. A blog’s content is a blog’s foundation. If your blog doesn’t consist of great content, why would anybody want to come back.

There are a lot of marketers who pay for content. Some simply buy a load of domains, build a huge network of sites or blogs, slap a few AdSense units up, a basic design and then pay other people to write heap loads of articles which they spread out. Then, overtime the sites build age, rank and small monthly incomes from AdSense.

Now this blog for example has 213 posts, this being the 213th. And I would say about… 190 of those are PURE content. I mean, you can count anything as content, any text on a page, anything on a page. Is content. But I use the word content in a more defined meaning to mean hard-written. And the vast majority of the posts on this blog are hard-written, took me quite a while to conjure up and usually cover, I think, some valid points.

That being said, how much do you think it would cost to pay somebody to write 190 + hard-written, quality articles? Quite a lot I’d bet, even at Indian prices.

I definitely think the amount of quality content on a blog should come into play when placing a value on it.

Site and Blog Evaluators

There are a lot of evaluation tools out there that will give you a rough market value of your; domain, site or blog. And there is a difference. There are some evaluators that are purely meant to evaluate your blog. Some which are meant to purely evaluate the domain itself.

But, all of these evaluation tools pretty much work using the same principles. They all check; age of site, incoming links, general mention, search engine rankings / inclusions. Then you have other things which some check and some don’t, such as your site’s Alexa rank. Which to be honest I don’t value at all. I find Alexa’s rank to be about as useful as… Alexa’s rank.

I’m not going to do a big comparison between each evaluator as I think that’s a bit pointless. Instead I’ve just pointed out one at each end of the stick. One which I would recommend you completely ignore and one which I recommend you pay good attention to:

Useless = Business Opportunities

Right, now, I assume this wasn’t built to be a competitor in the evaluation field but more of a general in-site tool people can quite handily link to for fun. But this may as well not exist lol.

According to that tool, this blog is worth $69k. Well, I don’t even need to express any sort of logic to expand on why that is completely ludicrous. $69k! LOL!

Useful = DNScoop

This is about the best generic evaluation tool I’ve found yet. DNScoop pretty much gets it as close as you can get. It checks your site’s age, all your incoming links, your PR, your Alexa rank, general mention and then combines everything to come up with a sensible market value.

According to DNScoop: Internetbabel.com is worth $2k. Sounds more like it.

Things That Really Don’t Mean THAT Much

I’m just going to briefly cover what I consider to be overrated indicators to a site’s worth. Notice I put the second ‘that’ in capital letters as these things do obviously help but I think too many people buying and selling put all their trust in these things.

1. Google PR - I used to care about PR, until I realized that it really doesn’t matter. Why is a high PR important or valuable in any way shape or form? Ok, so Google respects your site more, they list you more, they place you higher in the SERPs. So what, I get so little traffic to ANY of my sites from Google that it really doesn’t matter to me.

Google, not so long ago shafted this blog from PR 2 to PR 0 for, I assume - a PayPerPost post I made. I can understand why Google do what they do and I love Google and their business ethic. I just really do not care about PageRank. There’s so many fun ways to get traffic, so many viral ways that will get you huge traffic if you just apply yourself in comparison to scraps of Google’s traffic from months of trying to improve your PR. Let Google view your site how they want but don’t let them influence you.

This is why I think, when you sell or buy a site, you should really only take notice of PR peripherally. If I was buying a blog and saw the PR was 0 after 10 months. I wouldn’t suddenly think “WHAT, NO PR! WHOAH, NO GO!” Because that blog could of just been bitch slapped by Google too, doesn’t mean it’s not quality. You have to look at the whole picture.

2. Alexa Rank - The reason I don’t think a blog’s Alexa rank is very important in terms of value is because of Alexa’s infamously bad inaccuracy. It’s hard to be accurate with anything on the web and trying to be a dominant ranker of every site alive is beyond comprehension so you have to admire their valiant effort. But still, I’ve just lost more and more faith in Alexa as time has gone on.

With the recent update things appear to have gotten worse not better.

Anyway, I think Alexa is useful in that it gives a VERY generic and VERY loose view of what sites are where on the web. You can place some small faith in an Alexa rank when buying a blog no doubt but don’t rely on it. I view Alexa as another peripheral statistic. You don’t really need it but it sort of helps when trying to get your head around what to pay or what to sell for.

In Closing

To finish, here’s a quick checklist of things I would recommend doing to find the real value of your blog:

• Ask other Internet marketers and bloggers what they ‘would’ pay for your blog, without even giving them any idea of what price you have in mind.
• Get all the primary statistics of your blog and compare them to others who are selling.
• Research the marketplace, see what other blogs similar to yours are selling for and compare everything.
• Use DNScoop!

The best way and easiest way of course is to simply try and sell your blog. Whack it up on SitePoint or a popular forum and see what people would pay for it up front. That’s the real value

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• You can read Part 1 of How to Run a Good Competition here.

Although planning can be an important stepping stone for a good competition, nothing is more important than the execution of the competition. Obviously.

You need to make sure that you absolutely know how the competition will pan out from day 1. Otherwise, it will turn into a mess. Trust me.

You can always add prizes and twists but ultimately, know your goal and know how to get there.

Prize Value

Prizes are obviously the backbone of most competitions, whilst some competitions can run very successfully on interactive measure with communal spirit and fun becoming more interesting than the prize(s) included… very little can do that.

Big prizes usually draw big attention.

However, a good prize doesn’t have to be big in the financial sense. A lot of great prizes aren’t worth that much but are received well because they’re creative and/or useful to the people hoping to win.

An example of this is my logo competition. I gave away 3 free logos from LogoSamurai.com summing up a total value of $111. Which, relatively speaking, isn’t a big total prize amount value. Especially considering it was 3 winners therefore the value to each winner was only $37.

Despite the small financial value of the prizes, this competition still generated a lot of interest. Now, I did buy a John Cow review for this so it had good exposure but a competition still needs to be good enough to stand by itself once the buzz of any exposure has worn off. This competition did that and gathered a lot of interest and backlinks. It has been by far the biggest subscriber increase of this blog so far.

Now, another competition that I did in which I gave away 5 years of free hostingtotaling $514.25, which is over 5 times as much financial wise… didn’t generate as much natural buzz or withold the exposure given as well. I did give this competition more exposure yet the interest was slow and small in comparison to the logo competition.

The reason of course is because a brand new logo is an exciting prize. Even if the logo isn’t worth that much as long as it’s well designed… that’s a nice thing to win but free hosting… meh. I can see the mistake on my part looking back as hosting is quite a boring prize and despite the much bigger financial value, I can see why it wasn’t as successful as the logo giveaway.

So, the moral of the story is - give away exciting prizes. No matter how much the prize is worth, make sure it’s worth something to the entrants in terms of excitement. Give away prizes that you would like to win, not prizes you think will draw the big guns because they’re worth a lot. Of course if you can combine the both and give away a super exciting prize that’s also worth a lot… that’s win win and is really what you should aim for. But not everybody has the funds to splash out on big prizes, this is where sponsors come into play.

Getting Sponsors

When it comes to getting good sponsors, some bloggers / Internet marketers seem to assume it’s only the big boys with big contacts that can achieve it. Don’t be under any illusions, there’s no big secret to getting sponsors. If they don’t come to you, go to them. That’s the only rule you need to remember.

Now I know you may think that sponsors will only sponsor big traffic blogs that give huge exposure as only then isit worth it to them to give away something big for free. Not true. A lot of sponsors will sponsor small to medium size blogs as well purely for more brand awareness within a niche.

Even if you ‘only’ have 100 - 300 subscribers, don’t be scared to reach for the sky when it comes to trying to get sponsors. All you can do is ask and all they can do is say no. That’s the very very worst that can happen, so what’s the reasoning for NOT trying?

Of course the reason most don’t get sponsored is because they don’t ask. People like Shoemoney will obviously get floods loads of sponsors contacting him when he announces a competition as he has… 15,000 + subscribers and can give a lot of exposure in return for a prize. If however your not as big as Shoemoney or even close then you’ll most likely need to go after the sponsors as apposed to them coming to you.

Many people approach sponsors, some get them and some don’t. It’s all down to the way you approach asking a company to sponsor you. I find the best way is to keep in mind that it needs to be win win. Don’t just outline that you’re running a competition and you need prizes, put yourself in their position. Would you sponsor a competition if it offered you nothing in return? Try to reason and give them as many reasons to WANT to sponsor you as possible. Giving a company money would obviously defeat the point of them sponsoring you as you could buy their product(s) yourself anyway. You can often convince companies that the only incentive they need is to help you out and in return they will get free exposure and more brand awareness.

Approach big companies, ironically, in my opinion; they’re more likely to offer you something as they have huge advertising budgets anyway so any free exposure they can get they’re happy with, even if it is relatively small. You could also argue small companies would have more incentive as they need more exposure all the time to reach a certain level so surely they would want it more. Either way; go after big and small companies, just make sure you give them good reason to want to sponsor you and get to the point. Don’t tip toe around asking. Just ask. Straight up.

Gaining Exposure

So, you’ve planned everything out. You know how it’s all going to go down, you’ve managed to get some sponsors… now what.

Running the competition and how you promote it is very important.

First, inform your readers. In anyway possible, about your competition. Don’t be afraid to email them, if they’re subscribed. But don’t be annoying, some people don’t like emails about things like this, I know it annoys me. But most will happily read and participate.

Promotion is a very important thing. Get it right and your competition could explode, get it a little bit wrong and it could die on it’s ass. That’s not set in stone mind you, you can ‘mess up’ the promotion and still have a successful competition. Given that it’s easy to enter and you have good prizes, most people will happily jump at the opportunity just to not miss out.

So how do you promote. What methods of advertising are best. Well, I’ve found niche related reviews are by far the best option when it comes to promoting a competition. Still do all the boring free promotion such as; mentioning it in forums, telling MSN buddies, social networking shout outs and so on. All these methods can certainly help but not on a huge scale.

When it comes to paid exposure though, I would definitely recommend buying a review for your comp. There are plenty of blogs out there and you should pick the right one according to the theme and prize content. For example; I have previously given away a copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and for this I bought a review on an SEO blog. It’s just more likely to get good interest since it’s absolutely related. In terms of general Internet marketing blogs though - I would 100% recommend buying a review from TylerCruz.com. Tyler’s reviews are by far the best value at the moment, at least in the medium-big sized blog arena. Alternatively or additionally you could go all out with a John Chow review. His reviews are infamous for creating buzz and you will definitely get what you pay for, but it will set you back $500.

As well as reviews you should also leverage the potential exposure on your own blog. Even place an advertisement specifically for the competition somewhere on your blog.

To sum up the exposure / advertising section, here’s an entire list of methods you can employ and the best options in my opinion for getting exposure for your contest…

Forums

• Mention your contest on related forums, don’t overkill it but maybe make a small post if the forum will allow it.
• Put the contest link in your forum signature and make tons of helpful and insightful posts on big, related forums.
• Mention your contest on forums specifically dedicated to talking about contests etc.

Your Own Blog

• Obviously make a post about the competition on your own blog.
• Place specific advertisements about the competition around the place.
• Mention the competition whenever possible.
• Post regular updates about the competition when appropriate, don’t overdue it. Keep regular quality posts going to keep new subscribers hooked but whenever you need to, make big competition update posts.

Social networking and Chat

• Send a message to all your friends on MySpace, Facebook etc.
• Tell all your Internet marketing buddies on MSN, Yahoo and so on.

Paid Exposure / Advertising

• Buy paid review(s) within your niche, either buy 1 or a few reviews on massive blogs or experiment by spreading a budget across some number of smaller blogs.
• Purchase a few cheap advertising spots. Possibly a few 125 x 125 spots for some added awareness.
• If you’re feeling flexible, try testing a PR release on PRWeb.com

I’m sure there are plenty more ways to expose your competition to the masses, just be creative.

Well, that sums up part 2. Stay tuned for part 3 soon

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If you don’t give your readers unique content, you should quit right now. No one needs to read your rehashed crap.

Sorry for the blunt introduction. Anyways, I’m Jason Pereira - I blog at The University Kid (subscribe to my feed! ) and also am starting up Blog Premiere as a blogging forum for all. Make sure you join if you haven’t

Anyways, Nick is busy today so he asked me to fill in.

This has probably been repeated thousands of times, but ironically it’s the very same advice I’m giving you now - if you are not unique in your ways, and you are running a blog, give up now.

Seriously. There are enough John Chow clones around… we don’t need another one. I’ve noticed the standard of blog posts in the blogosphere decreasing steadily over the last few weeks - in fact, I used to do a “Best Posts Of The Week” section on my blog but stopped because, well… I couldn’t find enough posts.

It is time for blogging to go back to what it was when it started out… a way for people to express themselves personally over the Internet. Your thoughts, your views, your experiences - not anyone else’s. Your opinion. In blogging, you are allowed to be selfish - remember, it is your blog, and if people don’t like it, all they have to do is not come back. Obviously if you want to build a following and earn some revenue, you will be considerate towards your readers, but remember - no one else should dictate your actions. Yes, they may influence it, but in the end it is you that will make the decisions.

There is nothing wrong with taking the last post that John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger etc wrote about, and talking about it on your blog - especially if the post was a good one. However, you have to add your opinion, otherwise your blog moves from being a personal journal online to becoming a regurgitation of others posts. Although you may not like to hear this, should you follow the above and not add your own opinion, you are no different from the thousands of scummy spam blogs out there with scraped content - the only difference is that you’re taking the time to rewrite the post before publishing it.

This post is mainly talking about blogging, but it relates to Internet marketing in general - if you have an idea, take it and run with it. No matter how crazy it may seem… you will never know until you try, and if you put off trying for too long, it may be too late. Honestly - some of the biggest projects I have run have been ideas that I had not idea whether they would work or not, as I was an unheard of person in the industry… I preferred to go ahead with them, just for the fun of it and they have turned out rather well (like my blog, for instance). My latest project, for example the blogging magazine - others would have said that there is no way in hell that a sixteen year old with little experience of running an online business will be able to pull it off - I’m delusional enough to think that it just might work.

Ultimately, no matter how insane a project may sound, as long as you don’t spend thousands on it, all it’s costing you is time… and I have a lot of it. Working on projects can also give you experience that you can use in other areas, for example I spent a day working on a “One Dollar eBook” that I wanted to sell a million copies off, to become a millionaire - a couple days later, I realised that it was a silly idea, however I now had a product I could give away for contests, get people to sign-up to my list, promote my own websites… waste of time? I think not.

Nick is the same, as you’ll see with a new project he’ll be launching - there is tonnes of competition, but if you have the belief (and I know he does) you can pull it off. I’m not sure if he’s spoken about it on here but I presume he will when it launches, so stay tuned

Anyways, thanks for letting me guest post here, and check out the links at the top - my blog, the blogging magazine forum and make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed. Laters!

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I decided to tell my mom that I have blog. “What?”, she said. “A blog.”, I said. Wait a minute I’m gonna put this into a dialog. It’s way more cooler:

Me: It’s a kind of website that it’s updated regularly. The correct word is weblog.

Mom: I still don’t understand.

Me: It’s like a website.. On the Internet.

Mom: That’s wasting time.

Me: No way! In fact I’m earning some money.

Mom: There he is… Thinking that he will become rich and famous…

Me: Maybe… This kind of business is very popular nowadays and if well managed it has lots of potential.

Mom: Really?! Then show me where you work.

Me: I only need a computer and an Internet connection. I have no store or office.

Mom: That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you: your business doesn’t exist!

Me: No?! Really?! Then these $100 bills don’t exist, right? No problem, I’m gonna buy some stuffs with this “money that doesn’t exist”.

This post was guest blogged by Jorge, one of the minds behind 2 Magic Minds. There, he writes about money, beautiful women and humour.

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Blogs are great. We all know this, that is why we do it. We love them because we can express ourselves easily, search engines love them because they are updated frequently, readers love them because they provide more than just news or stories, they provide opinion. Blogs started off quite simply as online journals but have evolved into so much more.

There are such a huge variety of types of blog but originally they could generally be split into personal blogs or business blogs. Personal blogs are as mentioned already, a type of online journal, or outlet for someone. A business blog will communicate the current goings on in a business. It is a way of making businesses seem more human. What happens though now people are creating blogs as a way of making money.

Lifestyle businesses are nothing new. This type of business is set up as a way to make money from doing what you love. The appeal is obvious. The drawbacks are typically that the opportunity for making money is somewhat limited. The kind of lifestyle is a big factor in this. Some people have a hobby such as music or painting. Here they can either sell their music or paintings, or teach others how to play or paint. Pretty simple.

If your passion is travel, it is more complex. It is going to be tough to find someone to pay you to simply travel. This is where blogging can help. It just so happens that a great number of people love travel making yours a very desirable lifestyle. Already you will have people interested. Assuming you have the ability to write well enough, you could create a popular blog. Regular updates of exotic places, filled with detailed accounts of the places you visit together with interesting stories and photos could prove very popular. This alone will not create you any money.

Making your passion pay is no simple task. You need many key things to fall into place. Continuing with the travel example we used already, so far we have a blog, with interesting content and photos. I am not even going to mention the likes of Adsense, as this is not likely to cover any type of travel expenses anytime fast. It may be worth testing it out though. Travel is a competitive niche so there are likely to be many advertisers. A better way of capitalizing on this fact is to contact advertisers directly, and sell your own ad space. This way keeping all the profits. Whilst on the road though, you are unlikely to have much time to keep on top of this. Ideally you want a solution that you can implement easily and receive a constant stream of income from for a long time to come.

Affiliate marketing is quite simply selling another persons products. How does this relate to your blog? Well it is quite simple really. If you have been in Thailand, and you are telling your readers about what an amazing place it is, listing all the things you did, what you recommend and what to avoid, the chances are, a bunch of your readers will really want to visit Thailand. You have sold them on a trip to Thailand. If you have done this much, it is only fair that you get a commission for it. Luckily enough there are affiliate programs which will pay you a commission for any sales you make by directing your interested readers to the travel company running the program. If done right, with a big enough readership, this can work out to be immensely profitable, allowing you to continue your lifestyle.

Most of us have hobbies, and have considered running businesses that involve these passions of ours. Unfortunately not all hobbies are easy to monetize. A little creativity can go a long way though. If there are no products you can easily sell, how about creating your own. Instructional guides in either video or ebook format can do very well. If there are no obvious products, even in small niches, there is often a market. If anyone is looking for a niche product, online is the first place they will look. Being the first to do something can be very profitable in the long run so do not be afraid if you can not see anything similar. It might not work, but then most successful people have more failures than successes under their belt.

The internet is probably going to be the best opportunity you have to help you make a living from what you love. Give it a shot.

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Michael Dunlop from Retireat21.com has made a list of the top 30 young bloggers under 21.

I’m ranked #10.

The list has had 24 Diggs already. Front page material? Come on guys, help us hit the front! You know you want to

Here’s the link to the post, just incase you thought I wasn’t going to link to the post. Wow, this is a very long link isn’t it? Surely you’ve clicked it by now…

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I gained over 100 subscribers from my last competition and wish I had put more effort in consistently now. Too little, too late. Although I did come in 2nd with a valiant effort with my 5 years free hosting, The University Kid took the gold fair and square.

I’ve still only ever run a few competitions on this blog. Competitions are by far the biggest traffic buzz you can get, if done right. I sort of messed up my last one, picking hosting wasn’t the best idea for prizes to be honest.

Anyway, here’s some crucial steps to planning your competition:

Decide what you want to achieve from the competition
Obviously the most desired result from a competition would surely be a big subscriber increase. But not always. Some people don’t care so much about subscriber increase and the competition is really more of a marketing test and intention to send a buzz through the blogesphere for increased brand awareness. Inevitably though I think the primary goal or, core goal is always to increase readership. And it should be.

Think of a basic marketing scheme for the competition
This is not essential but some people like to be obsessive with everything and write everything down in neat little steps. To be honest, just putting the competition out there, seeing what happens and acting accordingly is the best way in my opinion.

As apposed to having a 100% set plan and budget that you will stick to no matter what. Some may like this method but it’s not for me. People are or can be, unpredictable. Not often, but it happens. You can never really predict the course of anything, you can assume, presume and guess but don’t take anything for granted.

Put your competition out there without spending a penny. See what happens, you never know. Sometimes, for bizarre reasons - certain things naturally spread like wildfire even if you can’t understand why it’s so viral. It’s the nature of the Internet.

I would say, give yourself a max budget, very basic structure and bag of ideas of what you will do to market your competition. But ultimately; observe, think, act.

Set the rules in advance
Make sure you set the rules in advance. Seriously. I made this mistake with the last competition and just sort of put stuff up then made the rules up as I went. This can be fun but potentially dangerous as it could make the competition look a shambles causing it to be a complete flop. Be careful and make sure you at least have a skeleton plan of what will happen and when.

Most competitions online are embarrassingly simple. Entry rules such as: Subscribe. Done. But entry rules like this are super effective, because people like to be lazy when given the opportunity. So the chance to win free stuff by doing nothing more than literally clicking a few buttons… why would people NOT enter.

—

That concludes part 1. Throughout this series of posts I’ll be covering prizes, marketing (in detail) and more. Stay tuned

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One of the most viral ways to spread your blog content is to constantly write posts that hit a nerve. It’s not that simple to do and I think takes a little experience to get right but it can be very rewarding.

When I first started this blog, I wrote a few posts that hit a nerve but my best effort to date is Big Bloggers, Bad Grammar. I just knew when I was writing that post that it would attract attention, the title just sounded good and the topic seemed like a valid debate point. The post got mentioned by 2 out of 3 of the big bloggers that I mentioned; Shoemoney and John Chow.

I think this post hit a small nerve partly because the title is viral sounding but also because the point at hand is sort of one most bloggers consider subconsciously but don’t fully comprehend or speak on. It’s one of those small points at the back of your mind that makes you feel like giving your input on as soon as it’s mentioned.

Much like politics, which isn’t a subconscious consideration, it’s a very conscious mixture of opinion; it still has the same effect. I think, if you just continue to mention obvious things and things that everyone is already fully aware of or things everyone reads non-stop… there’s not much effect to be had. You need to really hit a nerve.

How Do You Do It?

I think to write a post that has this type of effect, you need to spend a little time before hand and during the process of a post to properly digest what you’re writing and what point you’re trying to get across.

You really need to try and think of something that you have an opinion on and know other people must think about logically as well, yet… no one mentions.

These type of posts will make other bloggers think “I wish I’d wrote that” and will also make them want to have their say on it. You need to write on something that will urge people to give their opinion.

I don’t particularly think it requires practice or anything special, it’s just a knack.

Calling Big Bloggers out

Another reason of course that the post I mentioned hit a nerve was because I sort of urged the bloggers that I mentioned to respond. Yet I did it without fully insulting any of them or actually calling them out. Just sort of… subtly criticized things and hinted at a response.

I think it’s much better to do this as apposed to just bluntly and blatantly calling big bloggers bad names. It’s in poor character to do so, does nothing for your credibility and unless you have a valid reason… is very obvious as a ploy to get a link back.

Final Thoughts

Once you get a feel for your niche and really understand why certain posts are popular and why certain bloggers are popular, you will start to naturally get the urge to write viral posts.

Unless of course you’re just trying to make a few dollars a day with AdSense, in which case you’re probably just scraping RSS feeds and/or poorly rewriting other people’s good content.

Either way, I hope this post has hit a bit of a nerve as well

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