Thousands of web sites give away free products and extend special online trial offers as a way to build buzz and drive traffic to their website.

Running a link building contest and awarding a prize to your most active link builder can build buzz, drive traffic, and also provide the most important piece to the SEO equation – links!

Many companies with web sites should still consider typical internet marketing services to improve their positioning in Google. However, hosting a contest to generate interest in your website with the extra benefit of building links can certainly work.

Besides, if you’re going to personally front money for a prize, why wouldn’t you want to receive a return on your investment?

A link building contest should probably have one of two outcomes for determining a winner:

• To acquire the greatest number of links
• To acquire the most relevant, highest powered link

A link that drives traffic to your website can also be used to determine a winner. However, if the end goal of the contest is true link building, traffic should be a secondary concern.

Acquiring the greatest number of links has its pros (quantity) but tends to yield lower value, less relevant links. You will also tend to get a lot of entrants with startup WordPress and Blogspot sites including one blog post having a link pointing to your site. When the goal of the contest is to receive links based on relevancy, you will get a substantial amount less, but they should be more valuable.

Below are some tried and true ideas prize ideas to consider when building links hosting a contest on your site. The more involved the contest is for the user, the better the prize should be.

1. T-Shirts (bloggers love these, especially when they’re funny)
2. Anything for a Nintendo Wii
3. Any Apple product
4. A complimentary product that makes a job easier
5. A permanent, do follow link to the winners site of choice (a great idea for Google authority sites)

Anyone have great contest ideas or prize ideas they want to share? Would love to see some in the comment space below.

So, I thought it was kind of fun and cool that Jon Fisher and Jon Volk are having a competition to see who’s blog can rank higher for the other person’s name. This kind of goes back to the good old miserable failure google bomb that happened a while back. Volk is a friend of ours, so we thought we’d support him in his quest.

Hello All! It’s been so crazy around here… we have a lot happening that we will be telling you about very soon!

In the meantime… be sure to tune your ears into Webmaster Radio tomorrow at 1pm. I will be making a guest appearance on the SEO 101 Show with David Brown, Brian Mark, & Carolyn Shelby where we will be talking about link building for beginners.

Dave Conklin was honored to be asked to be on this program in part because of the many internet marketing experts that have appeared including Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl), Jeremy Schoemaker (shoemoney), Joel Comm, Michael Gray (graywolf) and many others.

The show will re-air in re-run and be available on demand for a few months after the live broadcast tomorrow at 1pm.

See you then!

UPDATE: Here is the link to listen to the show!

I am so inspired by this video from Shoemoney… this is link bait at it’s best. By the way, his site is incredible if you’re interested in making money online with affiliate marketing… you should check it out!

I was just a bit confused today when I popped Google up for the first time. See, I have slightly bad luck with computer viruses (they love me) so any weird little thing my laptop does sends me into a 5 second internal panic.

Needless to say, going to Google.com and seeing a black background for the first time…well, ever, that I recall…messed with my head a bit, made me think someone may have done the impossible and hacked the crap out of Google.

Than I saw Google’s little message: “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn – Earth Hour.”

Seeing as how I’ve been interested in the whole ‘going green’ phenomena for a while now and was even contemplating a “Going Green In The Office” post, I had to see what EarthHour.org was all about.

So I click, waiting with baited breath…only to be met with:

Lovely. Nothing like getting all hype about something online, only to be thwarted by that damn yellow, exclamation point-filled triangle.

I mean honestly, how many times has it been said – one of the fundamental rules of link baiting is making sure your server can handle the traffic!

And let’s face it – getting Google to sponsor your nonprofit organization/event is some darn good link AND traffic bait. I realize that it’s not Google’s fault that a third party website couldn’t handle their traffic – but still, they could have warned them. Google being the Internet behemoth that it is, I just expect more for them.

That being said, I was still able to see what Earth Hour was all about on a secondary site they had set up. How’d I find it? I googled that bitch of course! (Please excuse the language, it’s my day off).

So anyway, I guess I’ll turn my lights out tonight as well (8:00P sharp). I hope they don’t expect me to be turning the TV off. There’s a funny dude on Comedy Central tonight I want to check out.

Here’s a few tips and interesting facts I’ve read about ‘going green’:

• If 20 employees in your company turned off their computers during a lunch hour, you’d save 3700 watts of electricity within 60 minutes. According to Big Green Switch, a site with tips on greening up your lifestyle, that’s enough power to keep an energy efficient lightbulb burning for over eight and a half days.
• Go paperless when possible (using online faxing, electronic forms, read things online instead of printing it out, etc). IF you have to print, print on both sides of the paper, and use old printer paper for scrap paper. The Green Life by the Sierra Club has some other good tips on going green in the office.
• ABC.com’s spotlight on their ‘Carpoolers’ show even has a page with tips on how to start a car pool at your job. Needless to say, if many Americans would begin carpooling (or even telecommuting by working from home), vehicle emissions and pollutants would drop drastically.

Oh, and perhaps I should have introduced myself in the beginning here – I’m Ashley, the resident content developer, copywriter, SEO, PPC manager, keyword researcher…well, let’s just say I’m capable of doing a little bit of everything!