Holding Contests?

[Ferox]

I''ve read a lot of people saying that holding a contest is a good way to get targeted traffic, and I've been considering holding a contest of my own but wanted to run it by you guys to see what you think.

Essentially, it would be an animal/pet photo contest, with the winning entry (or two) being used to make another header image on Nearly-Dr Ferox. The winners would also get mentioned in a blog post with a link(if desired). It would have to be a photo of their own pet, or a photo of an animal that they took themselves.

Do you think people would participate?

[MarketLeverage]

Contests are a great way to gain new readers. If you decide to have the contest, you should submit your contest information to the contest blogging sites.

They will talk about your contest on their blog, it will help get more traffic to your blog.

[Bloggeries]

Make sure you have a goal before you start contest such as more subscribers or whatever and build the contest to build that up.

[Ferox]

My goal for the contest is to get a new header image in the rotation

I don't know how many subscribers I have, or how to measure them, but I think I'd see an increase in visitors and average pages/visit.

[Shopping4Coupons]

Are the photos going to be e-mailed to you? You may have a bit of work to do resizing and cropping the photos unless you are going to just show the winner. It would be nice to create a place that people could upload their own photos to a page and save you the labor. Your job could then just be picking the winner.

[ffnstuff]

Make sure to read my:

6 Great Tips for Hosting a Blogging Contest

[Ferox]

I was planing on having the photos emailed to me, so that I oculd finter out any that were inappropriate, too fuzzy etc and then display the best 10 for people to vote on. I don't think I'm going to get hundreds of entries.

[PaulR]

You need to be careful when holding a contest, don't ask people to link to your blog using a specific text. Doing so will very quickly get your blog thrown out of G's index.

Best of luck

[SizzlingPopcorn.com]

I've been thinking of a holding a contest also. Probably best to get them to upload it to a site instead of e-mail, but where would I have them do that?

[Shopping4Coupons]

Maybe e-mail is the best thing, alternatively you could create a facebook account just for the contest.

I just made one in 15 minutes here Stacy Jones's Photos - Dog Photos | Facebook

Next tell people to log in and upload their photos to your album.

Facebook.com U=animalsneedhelp@gmail.com Pass=doggie1

For a little more security you could email them the login info.

This is just a sample