I was very excited about my week of contests. I had originally planned for doing 7 separate days of contests. However, only the first day got enough entries to be worthwhile (22). The other two days ended with 0 and 2.

Why My Contests Didn’t Work

Well it was obvious that this format didn’t work. Doing 7 separate days is a little difficult unless the prizes are awesome (multiple) and the entry is easy.

As I mentioned the entry to the contest has to be easy. Enough people decided to subscribe to our RSS feed for the T-shirts, but no one wanted to join Copeac for $100. Even though the prize was $100, it didn’t draw enough people to decide to enter.

The last reason has to be the time. The contest time wasn’t long enough to get sufficient entries. I did promote it, a little late, but that shouldn’t of mattered.

Contests are becoming increasingly more difficult to successfully conduct, due to the large volume of bloggers holding contests. Why join yours, when there are 100’s of others going on?

Why Your Contest Didn’t Work

Your contest probably didn’t work for any of the reasons that I wrote which are:

• Bad contest format
• Not enough prizes
• Entry wasn’t easy enough
• Too short or too long
• No promotion

When used right contests can be a great promotional tool. We are planning a big writing project for next month with great prizes to follow. It’s blog themed so there is something for everyone.

One thing I hate on blogs is clutter. And yes i’m talking about those super long sidebars, flashing widgets and popup ads. And this clutter could be killing your blog with, longer page loads and the ability to distract your readers away from the content.

So here are my quick tips on how to take your blog to clutter free heaven:

1) Remove Directory Buttons - “but Anthony, the directories I submit my blog to require me to include these buttons” I here you say. Really? Are those directories driving you any traffic? There are plenty of quality that don’t require you to clutter you blog - use em!

2) Prettify Your Ads - Give your advertisers value for money by carefully placing your ads. Make sure they are clearly defined, centered in the sidebar or make sure they fit in with your design. If you don’t want flashing ads - ask advertisers only to provide static banners. In my experience it hasn’t had a major effect on income.

3) Remove Unnecessary Widgets - On wordpress blogs, you don’t need to have the archives or calendar widgets on your sidebar. Calendar is pretty much useless and just create an entire archives page.

4) Small and Sweet - Some blogs have the most ridiculous blogrolls that span pages. I like to have a max of 10 links in my blogroll, and these are just my favorite blogs. All the rest get put on a dedicated “links” page. You can also use a rotating blogroll!

5) Trim the Categories List - You definitely don’t need a category for every single post and I wouldn’t say 10 general categories is enough. To be more specific use the built in Tags (in Wordpress blogs). Surprisingly, having less categories creates a more user-friendly blog.

Do you have any tips on how to cut down on blog clutter?

Find me at BloggerTalk.tv and Follow Me on Twitter for Free Domains!

Contests have become a bigger tool for getting more subscribers than I had imagined. Now everyone is throwing huge contests. Giving away $10,000 in prizes is definitely hard to match. I haven’t even tried.

We hosted our first contest nearly a year ago. Yet our last contest was more than 4 months ago. I’d really like to run something for May, it will be a big month for me. With the competition it’s definitely harder than it was to get good participation on contests. However using the Top 20 Contest Blogs you can’t go wrong.

My Latest Promotion Results

I’ve stressed offering incentive to your readers to keep them coming back. Give them a reason to read and subscribe to your blog, beyond the content. Over a month ago, I did just that for my free sample blog. I introduced freebie friday to my readers where I would giveaway my own free samples to email subscribers.

With a little promotion the idea really helped my blog. I announced the promotion March 5th.

• March 5th there were 39 subscribers
• March 8th it was up to 61
• March 24th 83
• Today it stands at 94

That may not be as impressive as some of these bloggers throwing around money and basically buying subscribers. My method has been a bit different, the cost to date out of my pocket has been $0.

The things I am giving away, I received for free. These include keychains, samples, etc, basically whatever I am blogging about anyway. The items haven’t been too big so they have gone in a regular envelope with stamps that I “found”.

It seems however that the promotion has hit the ceiling. It isn’t yielding the results it once did.

Now I can either end the promotion or continue hoping for better results.

What type of FREE promotions have you been able to run on your website or blog?

When I put together 23 Things I’ve Learned Blogging (with Carl’s help) I received a lot of great comments. One of the comments was by George Manty of Can I Make Big Money Online. He stated that there were 5 of those blogging lessons that are most important.

1. What’s In It For Me?

For a blogger possibly the single most important part of running a successful blog is to set yourself apart. With millions of blogs on the internet, you HAVE to be different.

When I first started blogging and really learning (I’m still learning) how blogging worked I talked with my girlfriend about it a lot. How I could be better, reach more people, and in the end, make more money. She gave me golden advice to live by.

Why should someone read YOUR blog?

Since then I’ve done my best to set my blogs apart from the rest. This has involved promotions, giveaways, advice, information, advertising, guest posts, and probably even more.

2. Always Show Big Numbers

This is especially important when your main goal is to sell advertising or make money. In a niche like blogging or making money online, this also holds true. In this niche I wouldn’t show a RSS subscriber count under 100.

It may also be wise not to show how many visitors you get or how much money you make. I’ve followed some bloggers who have made a goal of it to make more money, which is okay. However, it’s almost embarrassing to display that you have made 14 cents on Google Adsense.

3. Act Now, There Is No Later

This is a perfect example of the John Cow blog that is now on the market for a buy now price of $45,000. I’m pretty sure they never thought such a silly idea would make them so much money.

Acting now could be anything from a new blog or design to learning about something that could benefit you. Since PayPerPost and Text-Link-Ads business going down the drain, I’ve had to learn about and join lots of affiliate programs to try to make up the difference. We’ve also explored ways to optimize for search engines.

4. Make A-List Blogging Friends

This is something I haven’t been able to do effectively, yet. You won’t see me in any pictures with John Chow or Shoemoney at a conference. Why? Because I have never been to one. A lot of the A listers that you know and read already have made money online, now they just put their face and content on a blog. I haven’t made my money, yet.

Even though you may not have A list friends either, there is no reason you can’t start getting in contact with them or any company for that matter. I have open communication with many different bloggers and company’s that have not only given me great opportunities, but a few awesome contests as well. All it takes is one message or email to get the ball rolling.

5. Make People Feel Important

I enjoy blogging and Blog about your Blog is by far my favorite blog, website, and/or idea. Our readers are great and I love every comment I get. 5,278 comments later (show BIG numbers right?) I still get excited reading each one. That’s why Comment Friday has to be my favorite.

I’ve gotten a little off-topic, but since I enjoy it so much, I want other people to as well. Often times simple questions from readers get turned into an entire post. Or comments get featured into a post, or mention. Anything really to show that my readers are important to me as well as what they have to say.

An interesting post that I put together was How They Started Blogging. I asked bloggers how they started blogging. They left comments, so I then took those comments and put them in a post. Interesting stories of how they started blogging.

If you had to share 5 blogging tips, what would they be?

Lots of bloggers have suffered a loss in PR from selling links that pass PR (and some that weren’t). We’ve lost one point, then had a PR 0, now we are back to 3. I still wish it was higher.

How to Request Reinclusion

To do a Google reinclusion you need to register your blog for the Google webmasters tools. Its important to have regardless. This is how I removed several old URLs (when we had a forum) that was hurting our search engine rankings.

After you register your website or blog for webmaster tools, you then must “request reconsideration.

Google Reinclusion Tips

I’ve filed for Google reinclusion three times. The second time the reinclusion gave us a PR 0. Our reinclusion request wasn’t very long and didn’t say very much. That was a huge mistake.

I have read many “success” stories of people getting their PR back and they all pretty much did the same thing. You basically need to say 3 things.

1. What you did wrong. Whether it was using payperpost or selling links, tell them what you did.

2. That you have corrected the errors. Now that you are following Google’s terms tell them how you did so. You either removed the links, posts, or added no-follow to them.

3. That you won’t do it again. A statement that you are no longer using paid to post services is a good start. Or that your advertising page clearly states you won’t pass pagerank.

Remember to give Google time to process your reinclusion. I wouldn’t recommend doing it more than once every 1-3 months.

Is getting your PR back important to you? If so which steps have you taken to get it back?

A powerful way to advertise your blog is on t-shirts and other off line advertising. I’ve looked into buying and making t-shirts for this blog, with very little luck. After calling several places the cost per shirt ended up being way too much. I have a BAYB t-shirt made on Printfection, however that costs $16 per shirt.

Vista Prints Free T-Shirt Offer

Unless you are buying in bulk, it’s hard to find a good price on custom t-shirts. Vista Print is offering a free customized t-shirt. You don’t have to purchase anything, all you have to do is design your shirt and pay for shipping.

Customize Your FREE T-Shirt

Even one shirt can help you market your blog and get off line visitors, online. I like to wear my custom shirts whenever I go to places with a lot of people, like the mall etc.

More Free Promotional Items

Not only does VistaPrint offer free t-shirts they just sent me an email with many other free and discounted offers. Whatever you can customize they seem to have it.
They have free promotional items like:

• 250 Free Business Cards
• 10 Large Magnets
• 1 Pen
• 1 Notepad
• 100 Postcards

If you decide to purchase any of these products they are at low prices, better than Cafepress and other sites I’ve seen.

If you don’t want to wear or use your promotional products, they could be a great prize for a contest for your blog. Who wouldn’t want a Blog about your Blog pen?

First I have to say that I am by no means a SEO expert, but I do know blogging. Improving your blog for search engines has never been easier for bloggers. It just takes a little bit of work. In the last month we’ve received 1,400 visitors from Google alone.

What Exactly is SEO?

When I first started blogging, I didn’t even know what SEO was.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

The better your website is prepared and “optimized” for search engines, the more traffic you should get. Here is how you can improve your blog and start using basic SEO methods to improve your rankings.

Change the URL Permalink Structure

It’s important for your blogs URL to include at least the post title. Basic Wordpress default settings give your blog, example, “yourblog.com/p=1″. This not only hurts your SEO, but makes your blog look unprofessional. You can customize your post URLs to have whatever you like.

To change the settings, go to your Options tab in the Wordpress dashboard. Then select permalinks. To have your post link just have the post title, go to custom and enter /%postname%/.

I recommend to do this very early with your blog. By changing the URL structure, your blog will need to be re-indexed for the right URLs. If I changed my permalink structure now, people searching my blog would get errors because the URL for each post would be different.

Install the All In One SEO Wordpress Plugin

This is an essential (and easy) Wordpress plugin for any blog. This plugin allows you to perform basic important SEO techniques with your blog. You can change the title and description to whatever you want. This is what the search engines will see. You can also tag your post with keywords which is also very important for search engines.

If you haven’t downloaded the All in One SEO plugin, you can do so here.

Blog Your Key Term

Pick relevant key terms for your blog and use them. The obvious best way to start ranking for the key terms you select (at least longtail) is to blog about them. Make sure to include the key terms in your title, post and tags.

My post, 10 Quick Blogging Tips, helped me start ranking for “blogging tips” and other key phrases similar to that.

Build Links With Your Key Terms

To get better rankings for your key terms you need to promote it. I’ve had bloggers link to this blog with keywords like blogging tips and blogging tools. I’ve used this technique for link exchanges and leaving comments.

Of course the alternative is to buy links. However this can be costly. You also don’t want to go and get 1,000 links within the same key term in one day. This could ultimately ban you from search engines, or for that particular term. SEO can be a slow process, but rewarding.

Comment on Blogs - Do Follow / Top Comments

Commenting on blogs can not only drive traffic and subscribers to your blog, it can also help with basic SEO.

By commenting on blogs with “do follow” or a top commenter list, you can build easy links with whatever key term you chose. This is how I gained better rankings for key terms like increase website traffic and blogging tips.

An important rule here is to NOT SPAM. All the comments I left were on-topic and provided value to the article and comment section.

Courtney Tuttle has the infamous Do-Follow List where you can find tons of blogs that give you SEO juice. There are over 200 websites/blogs that are now on the “D List”.

How have you incorporated basic SEO into your blog?

I stress to any new blogger and any blogger in general, that social media and networking is important. If your post can be popular on certain social media websites it can be very beneficial. We’ve just giving you the basic rules for social media and three new social media sites for bloggers. Now, to publicize!

What is a FeedFlare?

Along with using social media I believe it is important to burn your feed through Feedburner. This allows you to track and monitor your rss feed subscribers. One of the best features of Feedburner is adding FeedFlares to your blog and it’s feed.

A FeedFlare gives your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including social media sites. FeedFlares place a simple footer at the bottom of each article that helps you distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

This basically allows your blog posts to be easily submitted to different social media sites. We use our feed flares for stumbleupon, sphinn, and delicious.

Choose Your FeedFlares

Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner feed account you can select and add different social media sites as your FeedFlares.

I would of course recommend Stumbleupon, Sphinn, Digg, Delicious, and Mixx. However, you can add whichever sites that appeal to you and your blog.

How To Add FeedFlares

After you choose which FeedFlares to use, its easy after that. Simply select which place you want your FeedFlare to appear. If you select feed, Feedburner will automatically put it at the footer of your feed for you.

If you select “site” then you must install a code on your blog for your FeedFlares to be shown. The code is easy to install, we’ve chosen to put it at the end of every post.

Do you use FeedFlares? If so, which ones? If you don’t use them, why not?