Today it seems that every blog you visit is running a contest. This new trend allows blogs to engage their users to preform an action to enter into the contest. Contests create a buzz about your blog and if you have not done one you may want to consider it.

Michael posted last month on why you should have a blog contest. What was missing from that is how to promote your contest.

There are 3 types of sites to market your contest too. Each have their own specific type of traffic and users.

Blog Contest Sites
These sites are blogs setup to blog about contests running in the blog sphere. Two that I found so far are Contest Blogger and The Link Bait. The users from these blogs will be expert bloggers who are Internet savvy.

Contest Sites
If you are looking for some free traffic for your blog then post to some of the contests sites. Some of these sites require a link back of some kind or a payment but they can send you a lot of traffic so it could be worth it. A few sites that I suggest are Contest Hound and Online-Sweepstakes.com. These users are not all Internet savvy and from our own experience were not able to follow the contest instructions.

Large Blog Communities
One way to get a large amount of traffic is to partner with a large blog community to co-sponsor the event. This works well with blog communities that have 5,000 or more visitors a month. I suggest contacting the owner of these blogs to see if they are open to doing a co-sponsor contest and wait for a response. Depending on the community I would expect most of these users to e expert bloggers who are Internet savvy as well.

I hope the next time you run a contest these suggests will help you out.

Is there anything you have tried that works well for contests?

From John Chow to ProBlogger we have seen more and more people becoming Guest Blogger’s. The advantage to the host blog is that they get someone that might be subject matter expert to add something profound to there online community. The advantage to the guest is that they usually get a bit of traffic and maybe some new community members of their own.

You may see some guest blogger’s here on our own blog in the coming weeks. We are talking with several blogger’s to see if they are interested in adding to our community.

I found an interesting site that helps blogs and guest blogs find each other. The site called Guest-Blogger.com allows you to sign up and either post your blog or find blogs to be a guest blogger at. As a guest blogger you are given the option to communicate with the host blog owner and then you can start a conversation on if there is a match. I think this is an interesting concept and have signed up to see how it works.

Is there any blogger’s you would like to see be a guest on our blog?

I was reading on several sites that domain auctions are currently a booming business. One auction site is making around $4 million a year in sales from auctions.

I myself have bought a few domains through auction and found the experience to be great. I used Sedo at the time and it was a pretty slick service they have.

The thought came to mind that there was no Canadian oriented auction service for auctioning domains. Would this be a service worth while or just reinventing the wheel? If we made it only available in Canadian Funds and only .ca domains would that be to niche?