You’re not a real blogger these days unless you’re holding a contest on your blog. I’m currently running my Cash Quests competition and many other blogs run a contest on a monthly basis. The key to running a successful contest is to make sure that people know about it! The more people who know about it, the more publicity your contest receives and you end up with a better return on your investment.

But with the mass of contests currently being held in the blogosphere, it can be difficult to get the word out effectively and even more difficult to actually find a contest that you’re interested in entering.

What’s needed is a central list of all the contests being run on blogs where you can submit your contest and get it’s details in front of those who want to enter a competition.

Welcome to Contest Blogger.

Damn that’s a good idea

When I looked at another competition site recently, I remember thinking it would be brilliant if someone built a site devoted entirely to listing all the currently running blog contests. As blog contests are booming, a site of this nature would obviously boom too. Well, Phil from Contest Blogger has made the site and since he’s already received a backlink from Problogger this week I have not doubt that it’s going to be a huge success.

Before I even visited the site, I made a judgement call that if Contest Blogger was going to be even slightly good, it should already have listed my competition along with Michael Kwan’s USB TV Tuner competition and Blue Fur’s 24” LCD monitor giveaway.

And they were there. With a whole lot of others too.

What I really love about Contest Blogger is that it is fulfilling it’s aim and actually providing a solid list of all the blog contests available. It would be easy to only list the contests on popular blogs, but Contest Blogger has obviously spent a lot of time searching the blogosphere and has found some great contests from lesser known blogs too.

Lesser known blogs = less entrants = a greater chance of winning!

The site is also a stroke of genius by it’s creator as a lot of the posts actually qualify as entries in the competitions! That’s smart blogging.

Cool competitions and prizes

Some great competitions that I found via Contest Blogger included:

Most of the competitions listed on Contest Blogger are quite easy to enter and all entry requirements are explained in the posts. The site is currently listing about five new competitions per day which it makes it a good idea to subscribe to it’s feed.

The site also contains a useful page about how to start your own blog contest and has a nice submission form where you can submit your own blog contest to be listed on the site.

The search for cash

The one area where I feel Contest Blogger falls a little short is the difficult in searching for a specific type of competition. Personally, I’m mainly interested in competitions with cash prizes and Contest Blogger’s categories of Blog Backlinks, Blog Contests, Blog Writing Projects and Blogging Communities didn’t really give me enough information to find the cash prizes easily.

I also couldn’t find a search bar on the site which meant that I couldn’t just do a search for “$” and find the competitions with cash prizes that way.

As the site grows, Contest Blogger will need to provide an easier way to find the specific types of competitions that you’re after. A search page that enables you to search under such aspects as “cash prize”, “enter by review”, “cash above $50” or “free backlink” would be really helpful and make the site easier to navigate.

At the moment, the easiest way to browse the competitions is via the sitemap.

The site should also aim to be resource site, not a blog, and it would benefit from the removal of MyBlogLog widgets, Technorati buttons and the large profile picture - all of which are unnecessary. But keeping the RSS button is a must! Sites like this are primed to build a large base of RSS subscribers!

A contest promotion necessity

As the site is 100% free, you’d be mad not to submit your next blog contest and get it listed on the site. Contest Blogger has the potential to go “big time” and become a great promotional resource for bloggers to utilize. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll still find some great competitions to enter!

Rich people subscribe to Cash Quests