For those of you who haven’t had your head in the clouds, you know I recently had a blog comments contest. Today, I want to share with you some of what i have learned, as well as announce the winners of the 2 drawings that I am giving away.

This has been a great experience for me. I have run a giveaway before on my other blog, but this is the first time I have done one like this, and I want to show you what happened.

The Winners

First of all, let’s start out by announcing the winners of the 2 drawings

First drawing goes to….

Clayton of Journey of My Own. I have been following Clayton’s IM journey, almost from the beginning, and it is an inspiring story. He does not put on airs, or try to be an expert. He simply shares his experiences and willingly answers questions for others struggling to make their websites work.

Clayton gets 5 Unique articles on a topic of his choice, along with 10000 bookmarks spread across up to 10 urls.

and the Second Drawing goes to….

Kristi from Kikolani. I have recently come across Kristi’s blog, and I must say she has some really great stuff. I have really been impressed with what she has to say, even though our views don’t always see eye to eye. What works for her and what works for me are not always the same, but I recommend you check her out as you go through your own IM journey.

Kristi wins my IM Secrets audio series, where I go through some of the strategies that I have used to build my online business, choose niche markets, create content, and even a few strategies that I have used to spread my name around the net in various niches very quickly.

Congratulations to both winners. I will be emailing you both with your prize instructions.

My Results

This was a great opportunity for me personally. I have learned a lot from some of the things that I did, and I want to share them with you, in case you are wanting to run your own comment giveaway.

The first thing that I recommend is to target your contest. This time, I opened it up to all posts on my blog. this helped get some comments across the entire blog. However, it became difficult to keep up with all the comments going on. Select one or two posts to be the focus of your contest. Don’t drag things out and confuse yourself with too many conversations going at one time.

Second, Have your give away ready before you launch your contest. I had the IM Secrets recording, but I wasn’t happy with it, so I went back and recorded the whole thing again. The problem was that I came down with a summer cold, and wasn’t able to finish up at the time I should have. This is why it took my almost a week to announce the winners.

Have everything ready to go before you launch your contest. It will make life much easier in the long run.

Keep it short and simple. Rather than opening it up for a long term haul, keep the duration to a few days or a week at most. It became a distraction for me to have to keep up with the comments that were pouring in, and so I didn’t get some of the other work done that I wanted to. Clear your schedule, and be willing to focus most of your attention on the contest.

Next, Do more promotions. Although I spent a quite a bit of time on promoting during the contest, it didn’t build up as much as I wanted it to. I was distracted by a product launch going on, as well as a few other things and didn’t get as much traffic to the contest posts as i wanted to. Again, by limiting your contest to one or two posts this will give you a chance to focus more on promoting it properly.

If you know you are going to run a giveaway, spend some time pre-selling it before hand. This will get people interested, and ready to jump in before you begin. Perhaps a few days or a week before, make a post and drive a lot of traffic to that post announcing that you will be doing a contest, and what your contest rules are. This gives people the opportunity to plan on joining in when the contest goes live. Make sure you include the date that the contest will begin, so that people know when to schedule their time.

These are some of the things that I have learned real quick. As time goes on, I will probably see more things that could be better, and some things that went according to plan, so I will keep you up to date.

As I look back, all the way around it was a great experience for me. I got some really good comments, and I have learned a lot. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Thanks to everyone who came by during our comments contest. We are officially closing the contest now. Any comments up to now will be counted towards the contest.

Over the next couple of days, I will tally the comments, and do the drawing. I am going to announce the winner in a couple of days. They will be emailed with instructions, as well as getting a mention with a content link in post for their site. (we will use the url listed in the comments).

This is the first time that I have done a comment contest of this magnitude on this blog, and I learned a lot, which I will be sharing in the next few days. IF you are considering running a contest on your blog, you may want to check back, so that you can see some of the benefits, and some of the mistakes that I have made during the run here.

I also want to thank the folks from Famous Blogger and Comment Luv for the contest that they are running. I have met a lot of great bloggers, learned a few things for myself, and am enjoying the conversations that I have been a part of with other blogs around the web.

Over the last few months, I have racked my brain over how to get some things going around here. One thing that I have had trouble with on this blog, that doesn’t seem to be a problem on my others is drumming up some comments on the blog, and getting some feedback from the readers here.

I have been thinking long and hard, and I have come up with a plan that I am going to be running a giveaway for comments on my blog.

So, for the next 2 weeks, any comments left on my blog will be entered into a giveway drawing that we will have.

Now, I can’t just open the floodgates to every spammer that hits the net. Because of that, I will be closely moderating the comments.

1. Every comment will be entered into the drawing. So, if you comment 100 times, your name will be in the drawing 100 times.

2.  Your comments must be relevant to the post. “No, great tips” or “nice blog”  it must add value to the post, and be relevant to the topic we are discussing.

3. No link spamming. You will get a link through your name, don’t spam html links in your comments.

4 Keep it Clean. No adult related sites or illegal sites will be allowed links.

Now, what are you going to receive?

I am going to do is giveaway the prizes to one lucky winner, by random drawing, two weeks from today. All relevant commentors will be entered into the drawing.

prize #1 5 original articles on a topic of your choice, Plus 1000 bookmarks to up to 10 URLs of your Choice…

prize #2 , Internet Marketing Secrets — this recording over 2 hours long takes you deep into the strategies that I have used and many others have used to find success online. This recording covers everything from niche research, keyword selection, Content Creation, Setting up your own site, traffic strategies, and a viral marketing strategy that I have used many times to build traffic to my sites, build a massive email list, and drive customers to an offer they just cannot pass up.  The information in this recording is priceless.  You get the full recording over 2 hours long.

All comments are dated, so previous posts, new posts, are all free to comment on. We do moderate comments closely, so be sure to make it obviously valid and relevant, and happy commenting.

So, here is what we are going to do.