Without a doubt, one of the most popular gimmicks in the blogosphere at the moment is to have a competition on your blog. I’m doing it and many others are too, which means the best time to win lots of cash and prizes online is right now! But it’s not just the blogging community that is holding competitions. Every day there are numerous companies and non-blogging sites holding competitions where you can win everything from clothing and DVDs up to new cars and vacations!

With the competition phenomenon gaining strength, what’s needed right now is a site that gathers all the best competition information and presents it to the reader in a simple, winning format. The Prize Blog attempts to do that and being the “greedy-money-wanter” that I am, I decided to check them out and see if they could help me make money online!

Will I win prizes?

The first and most important question I asked myself when I visited this site was, “Will this site help me find cool prizes and competitions?”. Perhaps I’m a little bias as my $100 giveaway is on the first page at the moment, but I’d still say that the answer is “Yes”.

Just looking through the latest posts on the site, I was hit with posts about competitions form Ford to win a car, a trip to LA courtesy of Gillette and (my favorite) a ONE YEAR SUPPLY OF ICECREAM!!! How cool is that? (pun intended)

Without visiting The Prize Blog, I definitely wouldn’t have known about these competitions, so my immediate reaction was that whatever shortcomings the site may have, it has already added value (and possibly prizes) to my internet experience.

It’s not rocket surgery

Digging further, I found that what I really like about The Prize Blog is the simplicity of the concept – a list of all the contests, games and prizes online. Site descriptions don’t get much simpler than that and the beauty of it for the user is that they know exactly what they’re getting right from the start.

The site uses an “advertising-friendly” 3-column template with the main content being short posts containing descriptions of contests with a link to the URL of the site running the comp.

When visiting a site like this, I just want the essential information delivered hard and fast and The Prize Blog does just this by keeping any personal opinions about the competitions refined to letter-grading system. With the content kept short, there isn’t any superfluous information and this speeds up the time it takes to find a competition that excites your interest.

With short posts, I’d expect that the site is updated regularly and The Prize Blog seems to be working on an “at least one post a day” system which works well for me. Too many more and I’d start to feel that it wasn’t “only the best” being presented – any less and I’d feel the webmaster wasn’t trying hard enough!

When Is A Blog Not A Blog? When It’s A Prize Blog!

The Prize Blog is growing a resource of competitions, but there are definitely some areas that need improving and a lot of these areas are actually applicable to a lot of blogs:

• Keep visitors on your site – The contest information on The Prize Blog usually consists of the contest URL followed by the prize. As a result, readers have to click away from the site to get more information. By simply adding information on how to enter and competition duration dates, readers can find all the information they need on the site. They don’t need to click away and then find the competition doesn’t suit them. The result – traffic stays longer.

• Archives are old news – Unless you’re a news blog, there really isn’t a need for ‘Archives’ on a site. Who cares what you wrote in August 2005? On The Prize Blog, the ‘Archives’ become even more useless as competitions from more than a few months ago are usually finished and forgotten. Replacing the ‘Archives’ with a list of ‘Currently Running Competitions’ would provide more functionality and be a lot more useful to the reader.

• Comments aren’t always required – 99% of posts that I saw had the ‘0 Comments’ mark of blog-death and with good reason…there’s just no need to make a comment! Even if there were lots of comments, I’d predict these would be nothing more than “nice comp” and wouldn’t add value to the site. The comments area should be replaced with a feed subscription link which leads into….

• This site is primed for subscribers – Users of this site want the latest competition information and are primed to become RSS subscribers! The Prize Blog should focus on gaining a large number of subscribers as a site of this nature doesn’t need ‘Comments’ to grow - it needs subscribers! The Archives, Top Commentators and Calendar widgets should be replaced with lots of ‘Subscribe to get the latest competitions’ notices.

• Auction Ads don’t work here – It’s funny how so many bloggers rave about Adsense and it’s ability to provide targeted, contextual advertising yet so many bloggers serve unrelated Auction Ads instead. On The Prize Blog, Auction Ads was serving me ‘magic trick’ ads. How many prize seekers are interested in magic tricks? Adsense has the highest earnings because contextual ads work and on The Prize Blog, Adsense would provide links to competitions that WILL GET CLICKED. Well placed Adsense on The Prize Blog would result in an amazing click-through rate that would make a lot of money online! Even those annoying ‘Win An iPod’ ads would make a fortune on this site!

Overall, the concept is there, it just needs to be delivered better.

Is It A Winner?

The concept of the site is great and once it’s focused solely on competition information, it’s a site that could quickly gain a large readership and make the webmaster a lot of money. Thanks to information I found on The Prize Blog, I’m going to be winning a year’s worth of ice-cream and a new car!

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