Mark W. Shead

I’ve been running a contest at Productivity501 to give away an iPod Shuffle. In the next few weeks I’m going to have a guest post over at Problogger.net that talks about how to run blog contests–especially on small blogs where the goal is to get more readers.

I’ve started getting emails from other people running contests to let me know about their giveaways as well.  Brock from Existential Ventures is giving a way a printer to his readers. You have to join his MyBlogLog community.  I haven’t done anything with MyBlogLog, but it looks like it might be a good way to run a contest.

The ideal contest is one where you reward people for reading your blog.  Normally you don’t have any way to see exactly who is reading your blog and no way to contact a winner.  That is why most competitions make you leave a comment, signup for an e-newsletter, or something else that will give the blog your email address.  I’m going to have to look into MyBlogLog as a way to run contests.

Good luck to Broc on his contest.  I hope it works out well for him.