Why Contests?

Posted by Leo on June 25th, 2008 at 02:14pm

Recently I have blogged about John Chow’s contest for Market Leverage. And then John Cow’s contest, also for Market Leverage. They pretty much have the same system to attract you to join.

Contests, contests, contests… Have you ever thought of why there are suddenly so many contests happening?

Market Leverage, John Chow, John Cow and many others are doing this for a few reasons:

Increase number of Comments

John Chow asked us to leave a comment to gain the first ticket to enter the contest. A large number of comments surely reflects the popularity of the blog.

RSS / Email Subscription

To gain another ticket, they have asked you to subscribe to their RSS feed. That is an effective way to increase their number of subscribers.

SEO - Link Building

To gain extra tickets, you have to blog about the contest linking to John’s. By specifying the link text they have gained a quality / juicy backlink, which search engines count for ranking.

They have also asked to link to Market Leverage. Again, another juicy link, but this one is to ML instead.

Affiliate Marketing

To gain more tickets, you have to sign up with Market Leverage using a referral link. This way when you earn money through ML, they would get a commission.

What have you gained?

By placing a comment on their popular blog you have also gained yourself a link. If you have put your targeted key phrases onto the link then you got a higher quality link. I am not sure if they have got nofollow enabled though.

And of course, you have gained more chances to win the present!

At the time of writing, John Chow has gained 712 comments and John Cow got 74 (oops big difference). That effectively means they would have gained a large number of links as well.

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