Of course, if you want to use a contest to help increase the amount of communication taking place on your website, you have to put some careful thought into your contest and how you will implement it.

The first step in hosting a successful contest is to come up with a prize or prizes that would be attractive to your target audience. If your blog is experiencing some success already, you may be able to talk a company into providing you with the prizes for free. If not, it is a worthwhile investment for you to purchase an item that would excite your target audience and make your audience members want to participate in the contest.

Once you have determined the prize, you need to find a creative way for your readers to win the prize. Some ideas include:

• Giving the prize to the person who makes the most relevant comments over a certain number of days

• Giving the prize to the person who posts the most recipes, tips, photos, etc over a certain period of time

• Giving the prize to the person whose recipe, tip, photo, etc is voted number one by your community

When determining how the contest will be won, be certain to keep the content of your blog in mind. If your blog is about being a homeowner, for example, you might ask your readers to post cleaning tips, home improvement tips or even money-saving tips. If your blog is about baking, you might ask readers to post their favorite cake recipes.

By having your community members vote on their favorite entry, you can further get your readers involve in the process. Just keep in mind, however, that voting on things such as which recipe is the best can be difficult because you may get dozens of entrants and your community members won’t have time to try them all before the contest ends.

Hosting a contest on your site is not only a good way to get lurkers to start leaving comments, it is also a great way to boost site traffic. After all, as word spreads about the great contest you are having, more people will decide to visit. If you do a good job of posting interesting and relevant content throughout while the contest is in effect, you just may be able to hook your new visitors into coming back even after the contest is over.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is one of the most effective methods for drawing traffic to a website or blog. At the same time, it is potentially one of the most costly methods for marketing. If done correctly, however, the return on investment (ROI) will pay off quite nicely.

A PPC advertising campaign is one that involves paying to have your blog appear among the “Sponsored Links” or the “Sponsor Results” you find on the right hand of the screen when you perform a search with a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. You accomplish this by placing a bid on certain keywords and keyword phrases. Then, every time someone enters those keywords into the search engine, your blog will be brought up in the sponsored results. Every time someone clicks on your link, you will have to pay the search engine a certain pre-determined amount.

As you can imagine, paying for a PPC campaign can be quite costly. After all, even if you are paying just five cents per click and you have 1000 clicks per day, that is $50 per day. That comes out to be $350 per week, which can eat away at your marketing budget rather quickly. Now, paying $350 per week may seem worthwhile if it is bringing you 7,000 new visitors. But, if only one or two of those people are people who are actually interested in your blog, the cost certainly isn’t worth it.

So, how exactly do you make your PPC campaign worthwhile? This is where your marketing research comes in handy. Since you now know the needs of your target audience, you can select keywords for your PPC campaign that will draw in visitors who are interested in what your blog has to offer.

Be certain to select keywords that are very specific in order to bring in the right type of traffic. For example, if you are maintaining a blog about dog training, you should not set up a PPC campaign based around the word “dog,” as this can bring in visitors who were looking for information about dog breeds, searching for dog food, trying to find instructions for building a dog house, or any other possible term associated with dogs. Rather, select keyword phrases that are more specific to dog training in order to bring in the right type of web traffic.

When searching through the various keywords you can select for your PPC campaign, you should look for phrases that are popular while still being within your budget. You should also place a bid on phrases that will allow you to be within the top 5 results. That way, they will be displayed on the first page of the search engine results and will be more likely to be seen by your target audience.

If you are looking for a quick way to boost traffic to your site and if there is room in your budget, PPC advertising is a good route to take. Otherwise, you may want to explore other methods of marketing that are not quite so costly.

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What is viral marketing?

Viral marketing essentially uses the mechanism of ‘word of mouth’. Here the marketing message is passed along by people. The message self propagates as people send emails to others. It replicates and spreads easily.

Today individuals as well as companies specialize in the field of generating online revenue by employing viral marketing, much in the same manner as any other commodity. The forces driving the plan for launching a viral marketing campaign and the strategies adopted by individuals and companies in this market are similar to those of traditional markets.

The trendsetter in viral marketing was the classic case of Hotmail.com. They offered people free email addresses and services and simply added a text at the bottom of every email message: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com“. So as each member sends a message to another non-member the message to subscribe to Hotmail gets propagated instantaneously without any effort from Hotmail. Hotmail got millions of subscribers within months of launching it using viral marketing effectively.

What makes viral marketing work?

1. The keyword is ‘free’. Free email, free products to test, free services, free uploading of photographs, free buttons, free smileys – we see that in our mail and we tend to try it out. So keep it free and keep it spreading – the mantra for viral marketing.

2. Keep your viral marketing message short and succinct. Use the internet platform to your best use to propagate the message.

3. Use common motivations to influence people. What would people like? Free image uploading or free daily updates on their desktops? Imagine that you have a blog and you want to put a hit counter on the webpage. You pick up the HTML code for the counter from a website and put in on your blog. Now incidentally you will also propagate the website for the counter by having an instruction as ‘Click here to get XYZ counter.’

4. You can use affiliate programs and advertise your product or website in other forums and blogs and websites.

Here’s a simple example how you can apply all the above four points in order to make viral marketing of your product generate traffic and eventually revenue from your website. For example, you write an article on a topic that people wants to know more about. Then grant the readers the permission to replicate the article in their blogs or websites as it is and give you the copyright to it. Make sure that you insist your copyright statement is published along with the article. Within a short period of time, your name and article will be appearing in so many websites that you will soon start the benefit reaping the benefit of viral marketing. No extra effort, no financial investment, no lobbying – your name spread through simple ‘word of mouth’.