It’s no secret that one of the best ways to get your blog audience sharing links to your site is with contests.

We all know that everyone loves a freebie, and entering blog contests is usually one of the easiest ways to participate. You are likely reading this article because you own or manage a blog and want to engage with more people to increase your brand awareness.

If you’re finding it hard to get people on your blog and have them share links to posts, all is not lost. Here are some practical steps you can take to get more entrants to your blog contests (and indirectly get more links to your blog shared online):

Make sure you have exciting prizes to give away

No-one is going to enter a contest on your blog if the prizes you have on offer don’t interest them. It would be best if you thought about which products or services are likely to appeal to your blog audience. For example, a computer repair store might give away USB memory sticks, software, or even free PC upgrades. A florist might offer a dozen roses to the prize winner, or perhaps free flowers every month for a year.

There’s no point offering prizes that your blog readers are unlikely to find useful. You’re just wasting your time and money doing that. Instead, stick to things that offer real value to your blog audience.

Use creative ways to get people participating

One of the most common ways blog owners get people to enter a contest is by asking folks to share a link to their blog or a specific product or service. The thing is, people like a challenge, and you can use that fact to your advantage and get them talking about your competition (and brand).

Here are a few examples of creative ways to have entrants participate in your contests:

• Have people send themed drawings to your blog’s Snapchat account;
• Get your blog followers to fill in a survey. Sites like SurveyMonkey are useful for creating surveys and storing the results;
• Ask people to fill out a crossword or do a word search that you create. You can use crossword generators like WordMint to help you.

Make sure your blog is accessible

It might shock you to learn that many blog owners don’t realize how inaccessible their sites are for various reasons! For instance, their blogs might be inaccessible because they don’t display correctly on a mobile device. Or visitors from certain parts of the world get blocked from a poorly-configured webserver firewall.

Before you create any blog contests, make sure people can actually visit your site from desktop and mobile devices, both in the same country as you and from abroad.

Keep sharing links to your blog content on social media

It might sound like the obvious is getting stated here, but you need to make sure that your blog followers on social media know about your contest! The only way you can make that happen is by regularly sharing links to the contest on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever else you have a social media profile.

Good luck!