I have a great idea for a contest that will generate links...but how do I promote it when I have little traffic?
-
I'm working on a new real estate site and I've got some great ideas to generate links. One of these ideas is a pretty neat contest. (I'd tell you what it is, but really...this is one of those ideas where people will go, 'Man! I wish I thought of that', so I want to do it first before anyone else steals my idea.
)
The contest involves readers submitting photos and other readers voting on them. I anticipate it will generate some good press both locally and internationally if I can get enough submissions. But, the question is, how do I get contest submissions when I don't have good traffic yet?
Once I've got some good submissions, I'll contact some media, spread it amongst my personal fb friends, etc.
Any ideas are welcomed!
-
You might be trying to go too general with it... figure out who you're targeting first then tailor the content to them.
-
Some great answers here, I'd add that there are numerous websites around the web to advertise your competition, some offer paid advertising, others free. Most offer a follow link. There are quite a lot of low quality sites, which I'd avoid, check their mozTrust etc prior to submitting your competition.
I've found twitter a great medium for promoting competitions in the past. Choose a unique, related hashtags and tweet about it regularly.
-
Building on @EGOL suggestions agree it is important to get the tone set from the beginning. To this end there is nothing wrong with soliciting the help of your own network early on...you can cajol them into providing good entries to start with. Once you have some good content you can look at some tactical local PR, local newspapers and websites.
How you actually execute it is also going to be important, making it very easy to pass along. I'm personally bullish on FB powered commenting. Again getting your network to start interacting with the content this way will help socialize it on FB.
FB advertising may also be a good way to seed the comp.
-
Its not aonly a good way to get links, its a good reson to ask people to link to you. find relevant sites and ask if they will link to you.
-
Thanks Steve. I have never been able to get something picked up on Digg or StumbleUpon...not sure why!
-
That's what Social Media is for
Use Digg, StumbleUpon, etc... to promote the contest. As long as it's done well you'll get some traffic and submissions... there's bound to be some well targeted platforms for it too.
-
I would go straight to other webmasters - especially if they have a local blog that might cover your contest or sell you a banner ad.
-
I like the idea of prizes for the first ten entries that meet our specifications. That's good!
Regarding the advertising...are you thinking Adwords? Or approaching local webmasters to purchase ad space?
-
Give nice prizes for the first ten entries that meet your rigorous specifications.... The first entries will set the tone for those that follow. You want to start with some kickass stuff and not a bunch of slackers.
Advertise these as a "mystery contest" on local websites (use local websites because those people are already online and can click straight away to your site,)
Be friendly and encouraging but let them know that you expect good stuff.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Link Spring Clean
Hey, Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean? We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc) Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia1 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
E-commerce site structure & link juice: Bouncing off an idea
Hi guys, Question from a new-comer in SEO. Summary of the situation: potential customers are searching for a generic product category (buy mountainbike) more often than a brand in that category (Specialized MTB). And the latter is searched more often than a specific product ('some specific product from Specialized brand'). Both the brand pages and product pages are not ranking good Then would it be a good idea to have the category pages only link to the brand pages? They may show the products, but the links wouldn't pass link juice. I'm not even sure if that is technically possible, but I wanted to figure out the merit first. I'm hoping this would support the brand pages to rank better as they take in more volume. Please do feel free to teach me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter850 -
Links how long do they show?
How long do links show for in software such as Majestic ect once the link has been removed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
For those of you that used LINK DETOX.
Did you go ahead and remove all the TOXIC and HIGH RISK links? Just the toxic? Were you successful with the tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Why traffic to my link has dropped suddenly?
Hi I would like to know why the traffic for the website link http://theindustrymeasure.com/2010/07/15/rediffmail-login has dropped suddenly on google.I used to get around 5000 page views on this page and then suddenly dropped to 15-20 . I still get good traffic from yahoo (around 500). Just before the drop I noticed that I started to get spammy trackbacks from Many questionable sources. I have not approved any of these trackbacks. The trackbacks are regular frequency of. 1 per day. is there any action which I can take to ensure that I get back my traffic. Traffic to other links are fine , only this page seems to have dropped off ever since the spam attack. As per seomoz tool I have a grade a for keyword rediffmail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShoutOut0 -
Any ideas?
Hi there. We've been working on this site for a few months now - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. We were hired as the previous agency was seeing traffic fall by 40% year on year consistently. Now, we've managed to stop that drop, but traffic recovery in Google (Bing and Yahoo are fine) is being really sluggish. Here's what we've done: Converted URLs from dynamic to static Sorted duplicate content errors Cut down the number of on-page links (Still not under a hundred, but that's really tricky) Carried out on-page optimisation on hundreds of inner pages, including adding new content Does anybody have any ideas on anything we cou;d be missing? We're just starting to get going on link building, so that's the next step. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0