Competitions... But do they work ?!

Hi warriors

Doing my usual trips round some blogs in my 'make money' niche and I cant help but notice the ammount of competitions on offer.

Now these are blogs I take part in regularly so my persoanl opinion is that they are great. Most are just asking for you to join their RSS feed or simular, which if they offer good value anyway then I see this as an extra bonus.

I even know of some with prizes totaling over 10k ! These are obviously the higher traffic blogs that can leverage that power to bring on bigger sponsers

But do they actually have a positive effect on a blog ??

I guess there are a few ways to look at it...

You are giving away free stuff so are you just bringing in free loaders that will offer no value to your business ??

But on the flip side these people will be into online marketing if you are offering those types of prizes right ?? So is it a rather good marketing method for your blog ?

I suspect it will be a bit of both but my gut feeling tells me that it will serve a lot more good to your business than not

Yes I expect you will get some free loaders but surely most will be active marketers dont you think ??

Well im gunna do my own test at my blog and if any one is interested in knowing the results then I will post about it when it ends in a few weeks.

Obviously I dont have massive power yet to bring on the BIG sponsers of 1000's of dollars but prizes are building well from some big players so I know I can offer good value so it should be a good test for me.

So what do you think the aim should be with running a competition ? With mine Im not looking to make money from them but more so build more regular traffic to my blog. I hope to bring awareness to what I do and therefore let more people see the value I can offer them online

Let me know what your thoughts are on this question

Dean