The Blog Of Oussama Messaoud - Ways to make money online -

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Winning won’t stop on messaoud.info. Today is Friday, and Friday is the day I announce the weekly winning RSS subscriber. This week, the prize is 1000 ECs, and the winner is : niceb…..y@gmail.com. Congrats!! I will send an email to the winner right now, and ask for the prize to be claimed. If claimed Monday or sooner, I will immediately transfer the 1000 ECs. If not, I will email the second in the list, and so on.

On another note, you may have noticed that I recently added a twitter counter, from twittercounter.com. It shows the number of your twitter followers (almost) real time. I say almost because as I write these lines, the counter shows 88, although twitter says I have 92 followers. 2 weeks ago, I had ONE follower. Yeah right, one! Here is the graph that shows the evolution over the last week (click to enlarge) :

What I did is pretty (I mean really, seriously, very very) easy and everyone can  start having more followers in twitter immediately. When I started the experiment, I received the first email notifying me of a new follower in the next 3 minutes!! It can take longer, but it will be nothing but quick.

Enough talking already. The trick is : You follow, you get followed. This is a general ststement. It is very true. Start following people, they will follow you. A big pourcentage will. But if you just starting following anyone on twitter, you may not get quick returns, and the rate will be fairly low. The thing here is to target people who will be interested by what you’re doing, and will more likely follow you if you do. So if you’re to start doing this, start by following those who follow the big names in your niche. If you are in MMO, Affiliate Marketing or something similar, follow the followers of ProBlogger, John Chow, Shoemoney. These people will follow you back. And they are those you want to follow anyway, since you have the same field of interest. The more you follow, the more you get followed, and you will also get a wider list of people you can socialize with, which brings you more exposure and increases your blog’s profitability. I personnally add 10 to 20 people daily to the list of those I follow and I get 7 to 8 new followers per day. I chose to go slowly because I think it’s better for interaction. You can choose to go faster and add 100 people to your list daily, but I don’t recommend it.

I would love to hear how it works out with you. If you choose to give it a try, please feel free to share your experience with us. If you have other tips, I’d love to hear them.

As you all know, I ran a RSS contest in September, which ended by awarding the big winner the sum of $10 sent by PayPal.  Generally speaking and from what appears to everyone, a contest is synonym to giveaways and prizes given by the contest organizer. It looks like the owner of the contest is spending money in return of immaterial benefit. Well, let me say that this is far from a WYSIWYG situation. In fact, contests are a great way to make money online. I will try to explain this here.

First off, let me put this forward. From what I’ve experienced, people prefer cash when it comes to prizes. That’s a general stake. Off course, exceptions can still happen, but in general, you have bigger chances of intersting people to join the contest when you are offering green cash. $5 in cash are better than $10 in advertizing or anything else, especially when your blog is small to medium. I’ve seen very successful contests offering a review on John Chow Dot Com. But then it’s John Chow, so the value here is even bigger than the price of the review itself. I hope I make sense here.

Second thing is : Make sure your contest is easy to join. I love easy and free cash. Everybody does. When I can enter a contest that has cash to win (or a valuable prize in that matter), in a minute or two, I don’t hesitate. Whereas, if I need to subscribe, then send an email, write 2 posts and a poem and comment on 10 blogs, I am not sure I’ll be part of the whole thing. You get the point.

Third thing is : Don’t make it neither too long in time, nor too short. I personnally love 2-weeks-long contests. I think it’s the perfect duration. People have enough time to join, and in the same time won’t be discouraged for waiting to long before the results come out.

After you make sure you take care of these three points, you have to communicate and advertize your contest. For my last contest, I used projectwonderful, entrecard and contest blogs (there are plenty of them, they gather all contests and post about them : What I did here is I gave extra entries for people who blog about the contest. A lot of contest blogs took the extra entries because they blog about contests anyway. So they didn’t  hesitate here and I got some great links). Communicating is key here. You can have the greatest contest ever, but if no one knows about it, you will fail. The good thing about contests is that they get viral very quickly.

This said, I can get back to what the title of this post is all about : How contests make money online. In fact, from what was said previously, contests bring you :

- More traffic : That’s because people will link to you (contest blogs, remember?), especially if you give them incentive for doing so (extra entries for example). Also, your campaigns will bring more people if you make it clear in your banners, text links, etc. that there is cash to win. People will tend to click and come to your blog more frequently that usual. It is proven (from my experience and what I hear from other bloggers) that contest campaigns have higher CTR (Click-Through Rate).
It is also a common knowledge that traffic = earning (more clicks on affiliate links, on your Adsense, more exposure and more sales). So if you increase traffic, you’ll make more money online.
- More RSS subscribers : 99% of contests involve subscribing to RSS feed. And they are indeed a great way to increase the RSS count. This means more loyal readers to your blog, which is the best thing you can have for a sustainable traffic and growth of your blog. Again more traffic and more money. On the long run, RSS count can be crucial if you intend to sell your blog at some point in time. it will increase the blog’s value, and will allow you to make more money out of it.
- Contests if done properly, increase the authority of your blog and draw the attention of people to your blog. That’s what you always needed, right? Now it’s up to you to deliver good content that will keep your readership and attract new readers. This is very important. Otherwise, the effect of the contest will be very short term. You don’t want this. More long term readers = more long term money.

These were some thoughts about contests and how they can help you, especially when starting, in growing your blog. My last contest caused an increase in AdSense revenue, in  RSS readership, in Traffic and in Technorati authority. I think it was worth the money spent on it. Think of a contest as a project that can have a great ROI if done properly : Plan, decide all the details and use what I just talked about here. You should be able to see some nice and quick results.

What about your contest experiences? Are you planning to hold a contest? 

As I mentionned in my previous post, there will be weekly RSS winners on my blog, that will be picked up randomly from the existing subscribers, every Friday. This week’s prize is 1000 ECs ($6 value). If any of you is not an Entrecard member yet (which I doubt), you can sign up for free here. EC is a great way of increasing traffic to your blog and interacting with other bloggers.

I know, I know. This should have been announced yesterday, but I couldn’t get it done yesterday, so it’s released now. (Don’t jump to the result already). First of all, I would like to thank all of you guys who participated in the contest. 425 entries were confirmed into the pool and the Sequence Generator of Random.org was used to determine the 3 winners who are :

1st Prize - Giveaway City from giveawaycity.blogspot.com : Winner of $10 via paypal
2nd Prize - Brian from allblogcontests.blogspot.com : Winner of one month of 125×125 advertizing on messaoud.info
3rd Prize - Flisha from randomdetox.com : Winner of one month of text link advertizing on messaoud.info

Congratulations guys. Winners still need to claim their prizes before October 5th. If a prize is not claimed, the next in the sequence will have an option for claiming it. So, there is still a little chance for everyone to win
To claim your prizes, please drop me a line via the contact form of this blog, before the set deadline.

This contest has been a great success. It almost tripled my RSS subscribers count and generated some great traffic and backlinks. Which is great for only 2 weeks. This said, I ain’t stopping here. More surprises are reserved for you guys.

September was called the “Subscribers Month“. October will be called the “Subscribers Get More” Month. In fact, during the month of October, I won’t stop sending the Blogging Tips for my subscribers with every new post. Initially, it was meant to be in September only, but I think I shouldn’t stop it as it is a way to say thank you to all my faithful RSS readers. But again, winning won’t stop here on messaoud.info.

Every week, during the month of October, I will pick a random email subscriber to win a prize. Prize of the week will be announced every Saturday and a winner will be picked up the next Friday. Prizes can be cash, giveaways, coupons, entrecards, advertizing, etc… Also, I will use this opportunity to announce that I accept sponsors who are willing to offer prizes for my weekly winners. If interested, please drop me a line via the contact form.

So, if you are already subscribed, you need to do nothing more; you are in and good to go for winning more and more. If you are not subscribed yet, do it right now and enter your email in the form below :

Again, congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who joined the contest and made it a great experience.

Hey everyone.

Just a quick reminder to let you guys know that 2 days are left for those who didn’t join my RSS contest yet, for a chance to win $10 in cash via paypal, or free advertizing. This is also for those who already joined, but want to add more entries and increase their chances. If you didn’t blog about the contest, didn’t refer someone, go do it and earn extra entries that can be decisive when the draw will be done. Deadline for joining is September 30th.

On another note, I added a FREEBIES section to my blog. This section will contain a list of freebies (e-books, applications, tools, etc.) that can help you market your blogs, get more traffic and learn techniques to maximize your profit online. I have a collection of free tools that I will use to populate that list. I started with 2 free e-books already and other freebies will follow. I am positive that this new section will become one of the most visited places of this blog in no time.

Please feel free to let me know what you would like to see in that section. What type of tools? Anything in particular?

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