Fleeing The Social Scene

Contests:

Everyone loves the chance to win at something. Blog contests have been the latest in a series of crazes to sweep the blogosphere lately. BlueFur.com even made a post about the trend of contests as a way to gain traffic not too long ago. While contests allow a reader a chance to win something, they also offer the writer(s) of the blog a chance to get a large amount of promotion for their blog, oh and also backlinks!

Derrich from Derrich.com did a few “blogger tournaments” during the month of March to parallel the March Madness NCAA Basketball Tournament. Somehow I was lucky enough to be chosen to take part. While I did end up coming in second, I know I made a few plugs for myself, and Derrich.com likewise. Now I may have been promoting people to vote for me, but everyone I wanted to vote for me also headed over to Derrich’s site.

So even if I didn’t end up winning, and the traffic may have not stayed around, but it still give Derrich quite the boost in traffic. Now Derrich’s first tournament helped him so much that he held a second tournament. I haven’t asked for numbers, but I think these tournaments helped solidify Derrich’s position as a credible and entertaining blogger.

Aside from Derrich, several other bloggers such as Darren Rowse, and John Chow also employ the use of the contest as a means for drawing traffic. (Not like the pros need to “draw traffic”.)

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Segmented Posts:

Look at my title, see the “Part 2″? That’s what this post is all about. Splitting topics and posts up into segmented parts to keep those readers coming back. Well this tactic can be used for a few reasons, most notably, either making posts smaller in length to break up a longer talk, or to group posts of the same or similar topics.

A while back while I was researching how to create a proxy site I literally StumbledUpon Dave Turnbull’s “Making A Successful Proxy” series. While the series had already been posted in length, I could easily go from one post to the next and follow the ideas. Adversely the individual posts allowed me to easily follow subtopics. Before you just look at my blog and say “Duh!” realize that the post would be quite long and time consuming to read if you were to try to take in all that information at once.

Matt Coddington also utilized the tactic of segmented posting on NetBusinessBlog.com when he covered the topic of “minisites.” While Matt’s use only covered the two posts, it easily linked the posts and continued the same idea, which he had broken up into 10 easy to follow steps. These posts for some reason reminded me of an episode of This Old House, in the way things were explained, but unlike This Old House, the concept of minisites is something which I was interested in and may potentially use while creating sites.

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