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29 Aug 10 Why Should You Write One Article in One Sitting

As we discussed in an earlier post, organizing or sponsoring a contest is a very effective way to pull visitors to your blog. We also discussed that contests could be divided into two broad categories — based on the nature of human involvement — Content-based contest and click-based contest.

We will take that discussion forward in this article, and we will talk here about 3 content-based contests that could help you skyrocket your blog’s readership.

2 content-heavy contests

Comment here contest

This is one of the best contests to host. The idea is quite simple. Ask your visitors to post a comment in the comment box to get a chance to win the prize. Also remind them that each comment will get one entry into a lucky draw, so they can enter more than one comment to get more than one entry. At this point, do not forget to tell them just one-line generic comments will either get filtered out by your spam filter, or will be weeded out by your staff. Remind them that the comment that will add to the discussion will only get accepted. Comment done just to get multiple entry and which does not take the discussion forward, even a bit, will automatically get disqualified.

Review me contest

This is another form of contest that you can run. Ask your readers to write a review for your website on their domain, in Facebook, or wherever they want, as long as it is written on the websites talking about topics like pornographic, abusive, racism, etc. make an e-mail ID, and ask them to send the URL to that mail ID. Promise the announcement of the result on your blog, and tell them that 3 best reviews will get the prize. To win the prize, it is important for them to include two links to your website in the review — one to the home page, and another to any other page. For deep lining, you can provide some options from your blog posts.

Guest post writing contest

The third form of content-heavy contest is guess post writing contest. Ask you readers to write guest posts for you. Announce that the best written guest post will get the prize, and the second and the third ranked guest post will also get prize. To motivate them to write a guest post, tell your visitors that each guest post will be published, and writer will get the byline for the guest post along with 2 links back to their website, Facebook page, twitter, etc.

Content-based contests are time consuming, so the prize should be good, otherwise people will not get motivated to spend time on your blog.

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20 Nov 09 Article Marketing Guidelines

Article marketing is a potent source for getting backlinks and traffic. This is the reason why so many article directories have come into existence. Writing for each one of these directories (I am talking about good ones) is different from writing for other good directories, and there are some guidelines that we need to follow to increase our acceptance rate. Every article directory has different guidelines, but there are some points in the guidelines that are common to all. I am listing is below:

  • Quality Content: In context of article marketing, quality content means non-duplicate, error-free, exclusive content. Do not submit a PLR, ripped-off, or any other kinds of duplicate content. The article must be informative in order to get published. Quality of your content also plays a big role in whether independent publishers will pick the article or not.
  • Resource Box: The resource box should contain a brief bio of author, and 2 to 3 links. You can also have your head-shot photograph in the resource box.
  • No Self-serving article: You should not have a self-serving, that is to say, you cannot have advertising, promotional material, press releases, or sales letter, etc., submitted in the name of article.
  • Abstain from pornography, racism, terrorism, hacking tips, violence, personal attack, etc. None of the article directories are going to publish your article, if your article contains any of these.
  • Abstain from using special characters, long dashes, curly quotes, HTML codes (some of them are accepted), hard line-break, Tabs, etc.
  • Number of articles: You should at least write 10 articles to get good quality backlinks and substantial traffic.
  • Grammar and punctuation: Though an article directory is not a bunch of strict grammarian, nonetheless, you need to use proper grammar and punctuation in order to make readers understand what you are saying.

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