Get Free Traffic

Posts Tagged ‘contests’

Run a contest on your website and give away a product such as a book, e-book, kid’s toy or something related to your niche. People love contests and will follow links to any contest just to see what you are giving away. Have them leave a comment to be entered and guaranteed that they are going to keep coming back to see what you have every day.

Now, to use contests on your website, you have to get the word out that you have a contest. You use Twitter and other social bookmarking sites to spread the word. You may have noticed by now, that social networking plays a big part in generating free traffic to your website. You not only want to use the social bookmarking yourself, but you want to get others to recommend your website as well.

You need readers and by offering a contest where someone can win something just by leaving a comment or even writing a short note about the contest on their website or blog is the way to do it. Backlinks to your site helps with the search engines and again helps with traffic. All of this is free and can drive traffic to your website.

If you’re looking for a quick way to bring more traffic to your site than you’ve had in a long time, running contests is the way to go. You might think that you need an expensive item to give away, but people really are happy to get anything that’s free. Offer a book, a small gift basket, or a free sample of whatever product or service you sell through your website. Gift certificates work well too, and are cheap to mail to the winners.

Once you’ve decided what to give away, put up a post on your company blog with the parameters of the contest. Give yourself a few weeks before the deadline to enter if you want to maximize the number of entries. The longer the contest runs the more exposure you’ll get as readers pass the link along to others who may be interested in entering.

Besides the traditional “shout outs” through social networking, you can also now advertise your contest through websites such as Prizey. These contest-listing sites are usually free, and you reach thousands of people already interested in entering a contest. Of those, even if 3% of them visit your site and enter your contest, you’re doing quite well.

Remember, you’re marketing yourself just by running the contests, even if the product you are offering is unrelated to your site. It helps to offer a product or service that is relevant though, so that entrants will have a reason to return to your site–even when you aren’t having a giveaway.