How I won the TechnShare Guest Post Competition

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As you can probably gather, I am rather excited about this win. It means a lot to me for a number of reasons, but the one that stands out the most is the calibre of the competition and the esteem in which I hold Devesh, the curator of the competition and owner of TechnShare.com.

I want to send out a huge THANK YOU to all of my subscribers, regular readers, and random passerbys who helped promote this guest post for me, contributing massively to the win. I honestly could not have done it without all of your support, and for that I am extremely grateful.

I would also like to thank, and give special mention to the other participants in the challenge, calling a special mention to Peter J, from IdeasBubble.com who placed third, (and is a fellow Aussie I might Add!) and second place getter Onibalusi Bamidele of YoungPrePro.com who is the King of the Guest Post and a most seasoned and prolific Blogger, (whom I have great respect for)

How did I do it?

A Guest Post Competition is there to bring the Blog Owner Traffic, and remembering this is key to your marketing strategy.  This is not about you or your ‘awesome post’, it’s about providing the best content you can and then supporting and promoting it like it was on your own blog.

With 50+ comments, almost 500 Stumbles, 60 Tweets, and numerous shares on multiple social bookmarking services, I definitely marketed this to the best of my abilities, and with the judging criteria being a mixture of quality and amount of traffic brought in, I definitely made it as hard as possible for the competition to catch me. So How did I do it?

I asked for Help

Having an established blog with regular readers and a growing subscriber base is definitely an advantage when it comes to competitions in the blogosphere, and I used this to my advantage by simply asking my readers through a post and through an email if they could come and show their support. I have to say that everyone (you) was awesome and the feedback was fantastic.

I Blatantly Abused Social Media

The Statistics of the Social ‘Sharing’ was a factor in the judging criteria, so making sure there was a high number of stumbles, diggs, likes and Tweets was crucial. As soon as the post went live I submitted it to the following sites: Keep in mind that in each of these cases I altered the ‘call to action’ text around the link, testing different methods. As a side note, the text: Adsense truths, Eye Opening and Mouth Watering was the message that seemed to get the best response, so it was the default in most cases, especially Twitter, where the word Adsense was hashtagged.

• I submitted the site to Del.icio.us, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Propeller, and the other ‘usual suspects’ in the Social Bookmarking lineup.
• I also submitted the link through Su.pr – a fantastic Service provided by Stumble Upon that increases your presence in SU land.
• I then submitted the post to the various social blogmarking sites, making sure to promote them as actively as possible on the site:
• BloKube
• BlogEngage
• SERPd
• MMOSocialNetwork

I used the Double Share Tactic

This is my hidden secret to getting those few hundred extra shares across all platforms, and it’s really quite simple actually, but it works! And it’s all about taking advantage of the awesome layout provided by the various Social Blogmarking Services.

When you submit your post, the page that it displays on has sharing options, meaning you can stumble and Tweet this new URL, which in essence is the same post. The advantage of this, apart from twice as much exposure on the various social bookmarking services is that you can time the ‘share’ so that a few days pass before you then share it again, thus increasing the likelihood of getting noticed.

Su.pr Size your Social Bookmarking efforts.

Su.pr is without doubt the best source of free traffic that I have found in the social bookmarking world, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Su.pr is like Twitter for Stumble Upon and allows you to submit your URL and a short message to your Stumble Upon account. When I post anything online, I always go to su.pr and submit the URL. I then shorten the URL  and add some catchy sales copy (as mentioned previously, have a few that you cycle between). Since I get a new URL when I submitted to Blokube (for example) I can go to su.pr and stumble this too!

When I submitted the original URL to Blokube I was given the following URL:

http://blokube.com/story.php?title=how-a-tasty-salad-and-a-supermarket-upsell-increased-my-online-earnings

I simply go to su.pr and submit this new URL, with a short message – thus increasing my Stumble Upon traffic exposure two fold! Do this for each URL you get with these kind of sites and you will definitely see an increase in the stumbles at the articles source (your blog)

Granted you get a new URL with every Social Bookmark that you submit, but I find that sites like BloKube that are designed specifically for the blogger are set up well to encourage new visitors to click through to the original article, and since these visitors are seasoned bloggers, the chances of them ‘sharing’ your story again is a lot higher. Result = even higher Stumble and Tweet counts.

I Engaged with the Readers

It’s a given in the blogging world that in order to be successful you need to really engage with your readers. The same rule obviously applies to the Guest Post, so I was always sure to respond to every comment that was left, and even went so far as to email those that left a particularly insightful comment. It was also a great way to potentially increase my own readership, and should be something you are doing anyway!

Speaking of Engaging with the readers…

I was thinking of adding a page to my blog that listed all upcoming competitions in the blogosphere.

• Do you think this would be something you would benefit from?

• Is someone already doing this and wants to link us all up?

Tagged as: guest post contest, social bookmarking, technshare competition, winner