Every summer it’s noticeable that contests spring up like mushroom as you can almost find them anywhere. In fact, here in this blog there is a current contest running that started this June. That being said, we can conclude that summer is contests season.
Anyways, the days where the contest is all about subscribing to feed, blogging about it, digging, stumbling it are probably gone. What you’d notice today is that a lot of bloggers have become more creative in creating their own contests. What’s in today is guest blogging contests which at the same I’d like to talk about.
The latest is the one that Smartbloggerz is currently running while the other same type of contest can be found here and there. That being said, guest blogging contests is something that will happen more in the future as its becoming the newest trend for contests.
Guest blogging has really exploded for the past 2 years now as evident with the whole scene. In fact some bloggers like Carl Ocab and even Problogger have already let the guest posters post majority of their content. Back to the contests, I can say I’m not really a big fan of those although I participate a lot into it. For me it’s kind of like ruining the whole guest posting strategy and here are my thoughts.
The Goal Becomes Different
People would argue about it since in order to win these contests you have to write good content right? The problem with this is that your focus shifts from reaping the benefits of a guest post featured to winning the contest all out. I mean normally with guest posts what I usually do is make sure the readers of that post will be catered as much as possible to my blog, get replies for their comments and me tracking numbers, optimizing whats working out and what’s not.
With contests, it becomes really different. Instead of doing things I listed above, I would then focus more on writing more and more guest posts for that contest, observe where am I currently standing, do I have a good chance of winning or not and things like that. Nothing really bad about but its like the true essence of doing guest posts diminishes.
Readers’ interaction Differs Considerably
Another thing I don’t like with it is that its really hard to reap the same benefits from it as oppose to writing a guest article for the sole purpose of making a guest post. I was tracking my stats (again my fave hobby, lols) and what I found out is that not a lot of people really read the article and go to your blog. For instance I wrote a guest post before and it gave me like 35% bounce rate to my site which is an exceptional rate. After quite some time I did another guest post with the same blog but this time just got a 69% rate. Of course things could vary depending on other factors but I’m sure the “contest” factor is one of the bigger factors.
When guest blogging becomes a contest, most of the consumers of the post becomes the contestant and oftentimes they are just lurking there to see and track how other contestants are doing.
Lesser Traffic
This is the obvious disadvantage of this. We, as guest posters will receive lesser traffic and obviously lesser bang for our efforts when we guest post more for the contest than for the intrinsic purpose of it. I mean if you see an awesome guest posts and then you saw a note saying “this is an entry to blah blah, join now and get a chance to win $XXXX”. I mean what would you do? Naturally we will participate. There’s really nothing to blame. You can’t blame the owner who hold the contest nor you can blame the sponsors that made that pot got that high. There’s no one to blame because its human nature, you see a contest related to you, odds are high that you’ll join it.
Overall, if guest blogging contests keep on growing more and more, it will definitely have a big impact on how traditional guest blogging works. With things I mentioned, it can be hard to really see the essence of doing guest posts aside from targeting those contest prizes.
But then I don’t have any problem with that (or just a small problem), in fact I’m even one of those who are competing to dominate win it. But still at the end of the day, you’re still gonna wonder where all of these things head into. What say you?