Popular bloggers can make a considerable amount of money from online advertising revenue and other sources so it is no surprise that so many people have tried to start their own blog over the last few years. Most of them fail due to dwindling interest on the part of the new blogger and the small number of followers that they manage to attract but even if you persevere, it can be difficult to build a large following unless you promote your site in some way.
There are many ways to promote a new blog, such as banner ads on other sites with similar content, paid search engine results and email newsletters. If you have tried these methods and are still having difficulties increasing the number of visitors to your website, you might like to consider giving away presents to your readers.
You can buy good quality, affordable gifts online in Australia and most other countries around the world so it is not hard to get hold of suitable products to give away to lucky readers. However, unless you have an unlimited amount of money to spend on marketing your blog, you will need to shop around for the very best deals and keep a close eye on your monthly expenditure.
Below, I have listed a few ideas on how to give away presents to promote your blog, which I hope you will find useful.
- Competition: if you want to encourage repeat visitors, you will need to do something to hold their interest. Simply giving away free presents might work for a while but if you can come up with an interesting way for visitors to win these presents, your strategy will be even more effective. Competitions that involve studying obscure photographs in order to identify exactly where they were taken are popular and the visual element makes them ideal for websites that are trying to get noticed.
- Awards: if you would like to encourage your visitors to participate in discussions on the subjects that you cover, you might like to think about presenting a monthly award for the best comment left on your blog site. Popular platforms such as google blogger make it easy to moderate blog comments by tweaking your account settings and most other blog software offers similar functionality. It is important to keep a close eye on the comments that are left, whether you are planning to award the authors of the best ones with a gift or not. If you allow visitors to type whatever they like on your site, people that are genuinely interested in the topics about which you write may not bother to comment at all, whatever incentives you employ.
- Newsletter registratio: if you offer a gift to every reader that registers their email address on your site in order to receive a monthly newsletter, you should definitely see an increase in the number of visitors that you attract. In order to capitalise on this new traffic, it is important to make an effort to put together a professional-looking newsletter that covers all the subjects you think will interest your readers.
Which is the best choice for your blog will depend on a number of factors such as the subject matter you write about, the platform that you are using, your target audience and the theme you have chosen for your blogging site. It might be that you need to try several approaches before you find the one that really works for you so make sure that the gifts you offer are not too expensive to purchase, to keep your costs under control.
This is a guest post by Yellow Octopus.
About guest blogger
Yellow Octopus is a business that is passionate about addressing the needs of customers who are searching for bizarre yet cool gifts online in Australia. They help people find unique ideas for birthdays and other occasions.