Stop Whoring Your Blogs Out for Prizes

Blog’s giving out prizes for reviews is a relatively common thing now. I’m doing it with my Palm Pilot contest and many others are doing it as seen in my blogging prizes post. While I find nothing wrong with offering the chance for a great prize in exchange for a review of a blog, I do find a lot wrong with the way people enter the contest.

More and more I see 100 word blog entries specifically made to enter the contests. My message is simple…stop whoring your blog out for contest entries. If the blog you are reviewing is related to yours, then review it. Don’t post a 3 line review like so:

So and So has a great blog about tropical fish species. In fact his blog offers a number of articles about tropical fish and aquarium maintenance. So and so is even giving away a free aquarium starter kit to one lucky person who writes a review of his blog.

First, the review is just too short. That write-up has no value to anybody reading it and can be seen as the bare minimum effort for entry to the contest. If you want to write a review then write a review. Describe the blog and its features, highlight and article you find particularly appealing and offer suggestions on how the blog could be bettered.

Secondly, as you can see this post wasn’t even related to my blog. Chances are the majority of the people reading my blog couldn’t care less about aquarium maintenance or tropical fish. Yes they are cool colors and fun to look at, but we’re talking about blogging and ways to make money online here, sorry!

Instead of writing the minimum consider writing a full review or even connecting and merging the review with an article you plan to write. That way your readers still have quality content to read and you get a contest entry.

By writing more than the requirement and actually providing solid content in your reviews for contests, you create a win-win situation. The contest holder gets valuable feedback and a quality review and you keep your content consistent and high quality.

We all like to win prizes, but don’t do it when it’s at the expense of your blog.

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