I’ve helped several blogs get rolling on contest with ideas and help. We’ve posted some great helpful articles like 6 Great Tips for Hosting a Blogging Contest and Incentive to Offer on Your Blog. Invesp recently did a huge 400$ blog contest and through my services I helped his contest get onto 20 blogs and posts throughout several forums.

Contest Sponsorship

Through all of our contest success we’ve recently been able to sponsor a few contests. We just finished our contest where we pushed the technorati top 5,000.

Groovy Vegetarian launched a caption contest where the winner can pick through several prizes. One of the prizes is a one month link on Blog about your Blog. Other prizes include a hemp candle, organic soap, and 10$ cash on paypal. I was happy to promote and sponsor Missy’s contest, she is a co-author at my freebie blog, It’s All Free Online.

Blogger Love Forum is working on their official launch, and who better to sponsor a grand opening contest but Blog about your Blog? By blogging about their new forum, and us the sponsors, you can win links on our blog, and several other blogs. I’ve been trying to get several more sponsors, so if you are interested in putting up a link for a winner, feel free to contact us! For this particular contest we are looking for blogs with a page rank.

I’ve got a few more shout outs for Derek Semmler and The Prize Blog, but I don’t have the post ready quite yet.

If your interested in having BAYB sponsor your contest let us know.

As you might have heard around the blog-o-sphere, PayPerPost is giving away an easy $20 to everyone that agrees to write about their services on their blogs. As this is my first post on this blog, I felt like giving something back to this community. This is your chance to win an easy $20 people. You just have to subscribe, submit your blog and write a 200 word article about their services. However, PayPerPost is keeping a desired level of transparency, so the tone of your posts doesn’t have to necessarily be a positive one, you are free to express your thoughts and you will even get paid.
The best part about this offer from PayPerPost is that you can register, submit your blog, get approved, write the article, get the $20 and if you’re not too much into having paid posts on your blog, well you can just forget about them. It’s as easy as that.
The reason why I wanted to share this with a larger community than the one on my blog is that their are obviously more readers here and there are lots more people here who can take advantage of this opportunity.

Subscribe now and get your $20.

Earlier this week I posted about how important community is for a blog and expressed how important it is to come up with interesting concepts in order to increase the community surrounding ones blog. In April 2007 I began a blog named “the Details,” a blog that was my ‘community’ experiment, and it proved to be successful.

I incorporated many ideas I had come up with, going so far as calling out John Chow himself in a “Evil John Chow Photoshop Contest” that received around 20 entries and inspiring blogger cooperation with my “2,000 words project.” The blog was receiving backlinks from popular bloggers, and was on a roll. It ended abruptly however because of a coding error by me, and my lazy nature not letting me repair it. At least until now.

The blog has been brought back alive by me, however I have went through and cleared out all but three post, leaving room to expand with new ideas. I have however left my 2,000 word project open and it is still running. If you want a free backlink to your site, follow the instructions on the page! I also pick at random from submissions and give the submitter a free review of their site, and will target keywords they want (PR4 Backlinks.)

I feel the 2,000 word project is a good way to gain readers (and a few backlinks *evil laugh*) so come join in!

Written by Mark: MeAndMyDrum | Fave MAMD | Subscribe to MAMD

Even if you’re not a professional designer, there’s a high probability that you’ve asked yourself, “What font would look right for this image I’m creating for my blog?”

You may have a gazillion fonts installed on your computer, but it’s a painful process having to sift through them all to find the right one. Or if you’re like me at one time, you’d copy and paste multiple instances of some text and apply different fonts to each to make a decision.

Well those days are over if you have one of these two font utilities at your side: AMP Font Viewer or Font Thing. After installing either of these, you can view that large collection of fonts you have on your computer with sample text that you enter. What a time saver!

My personal favorite is AMP Font Viewer because I can simply view more fonts at a glance. But either one will do you right. 🙂

AMP Font Viewer

Font Thing

In today’s blogosphere I notice to often that bloggers lose track of the most vital concept of any blog, the community surrounded around the blog. Often times it gets put to the side by the undying race for Blog traffic, which I actually find less important than to having a steady supply of contributing members, whether it be through contest, or more.

I am Nicholas Pruett, I have ran a few blogs and my quickest turn around has always been with blogs where I have focused on community oriented aspects of the site, whether it be a contest, or even a task as simple as replying to comments left on my post. Paying attention to these aspects of some of my blogs have gotten them to page rank 4’s within a week and a half without actively pursuing backlinks.

Look at any successful blogger, and you will notice at least one of two things depending on the content of the blog, the writer will either have scheduled contest where users can win items, it doesn’t have to be big, anything to sprout buzz. The writer will also constantly reply to all comments and in turn you will actually notice more comments, and some by the same people, meaning you have gained more to your community!

Examples of successful community blogs would be the famous google whore John Chow, who we all love and hate, and also Problogger. Those two blogs have a cult like community, and in turn their RSS subscribers rise, and friends tell friends, so traffic grows, as well as backlinks.

The reason most blogs fail is because they are not community oriented.

Writing great material is a given necessity

replying to comments and making people want to come back is often overlooked.

In the end, stop writing for a quick click and keep the readers at your site, I am still working on how to get readers to my comedian blog, and have decided to get backlinks for some of the most popular comedians Dane Cook and Jamie Foxx and once the traffic shows their will be contest, and I already reply to all of my comments. If you take time to interact with your readers, you will have a more successful blog. Community is more important than traffic, the money will come in time, and in more bulk if you maintain readers.

I wanted to announce my involvement with a blog I’ll be authoring called Family Support Forum. It’s part of the Blog Authors Organization which is the brainchild of Garry Conn and Christine Senter.

This was a natural extension to what I write about on another level with Family WebWatch. On that blog I write about Internet safety issues and how families can not only protect themselves from risk, but also point out fun and productive places I find on the Web.

On Family Support Forum, though, I have a larger canvas with which to paint on. As with any community I’m behind, I encourage interactivity and an exchange of ideas and information. I hope that you’ll add it to your list of reads and visit often as I invite your comments and suggestions for topics.

If you are interested in joining BAO, I invite you to apply here.

Over the weekend we saw the rise of two programs that can benefit bloggers, that is Blog Rush and DealDotCom. Over the weekend I also saw nearly every blogger I read (which is a lot) post about these two programs.

Just Because John Chow Does It…

Doesn’t mean your going to make money on a program too. Just because in his next earnings report he will be posting how much he made, doesn’t mean you will. He WANTS you to sign up under him. Then the referrals you get, he will get part of that too. John Chow will tell you that DealDotCom is “one of the best affiliate programs on the net”, but just because he says so, doesn’t make it one.

Offer a Different Point

We saw this in the emergence of the top 100 making money blog list, everyone posted about it. I tried to make my post somewhat different, but I also wanted to mention it because we are a top 20 blog.

However this past weekend I saw tons of posts that were almost duplicate (with different wording). With dozens of other blogs why should I read your post? Why should I sign up under you as a referral? Why are you and the rest of the blogosphere boring me with a post I’ve read 10 times already?

A Shining Light…

I’m becoming more of a fan of Bloggrrl. She wrote the only post that was different from everyone elses. It’s titled Why I Will Not Make Money with DealDotCom. It’s an interesting post and she even got to throw in another affiliate program, that flowed with the post. She is still banking on the hype, but making the post her own.

Why I Didn’t Jump on the Bandwagon

Besides the reasons posted above there are other reasons why I didn’t buy into the hype. Does DealDotCom remind you of anything? Agloco is the first one that came to mind. I’m not saying that they won’t pay, I’m referring to the huge hype before the launch, and then the huge let down once it did launch. I’m not going to tell anyone they can make money off of a site that I’ve never made money on.

With Blog Rush, it’s a bit different. I replaced the mybloglog widget with a blogrush code. Before I posted about “how great Blog Rush is” I wanted to know more about it. Why post about “how much traffic you can get” with blogrush if you don’t even know yourself?

When blogging be unique and different, don’t just throw your post in the bunch. Chances are if you aren’t different from the ‘big guns’ they will get the referrals and you won’t.