How Contests Can Benefit Link Building

Thousands of web sites give away free products and extend special online trial offers as a way to build buzz and drive traffic to their website.

Running a link building contest and awarding a prize to your most active link builder can build buzz, drive traffic, and also provide the most important piece to the SEO equation - links!

Many companies with web sites should still consider typical internet marketing services to improve their positioning in Google. However, hosting a contest to generate interest in your website with the extra benefit of building links can certainly work.

Besides, if you’re going to personally front money for a prize, why wouldn’t you want to receive a return on your investment?

A link building contest should probably have one of two outcomes for determining a winner:

• To acquire the greatest number of links
• To acquire the most relevant, highest powered link

A link that drives traffic to your website can also be used to determine a winner. However, if the end goal of the contest is true link building, traffic should be a secondary concern.

Acquiring the greatest number of links has its pros (quantity) but tends to yield lower value, less relevant links. You will also tend to get a lot of entrants with startup WordPress and Blogspot sites including one blog post having a link pointing to your site. When the goal of the contest is to receive links based on relevancy, you will get a substantial amount less, but they should be more valuable.

Below are some tried and true ideas prize ideas to consider when building links hosting a contest on your site. The more involved the contest is for the user, the better the prize should be.

1. T-Shirts (bloggers love these, especially when they’re funny)
2. Anything for a Nintendo Wii
3. Any Apple product
4. A complimentary product that makes a job easier
5. A permanent, do follow link to the winners site of choice (a great idea for Google authority sites)

Anyone have great contest ideas or prize ideas they want to share? Would love to see some in the comment space below.

- By Jonathan Bentz, Link Architect