I have a relatively new blog, mymochamoney.com, where I blog about unique money strategies to save money, earn money, and find those perfect deals in order to feed my specialty coffee habit. I titled it, "Earnin' The Doe For My Cup of Joe!" Since the blog is kind of new, I thought I would offer an online contest to try to increase my readership, hence my "Blog Contest Experiment."

As anyone who blogs knows, driving traffic to your blog and increasing your blog readership are big blog challenges. Offering a contest seems to be a good way to do both. At least I hope so. I believe my content is good and fresh, however I am a bit biased.

From what I've read, and it seems to make sense, is that when offering an online contest, you should give away something related to your blog niche. This is where it gets tricky for me.

I am giving away a new, factory refurbished Garmin Streetpilot GPS System. Now why would I do that when I blog about saving money, making money and finding that perfect deal? Not only that....why would I give away something that's refurbished?!

One of the topics I blog about is finding a good deal, right? In my article, "Refurbs Rule! Best Refurbished Product Websites Revealed," I list websites that offer refurbished products at awesome prices. So, I thought my contest award went well with my blog. Only time will tell. The contest ends on January 15.

My contest rules for the Garmin Streetpilot c330 GPS System are simple. People can have multiple entries in the contest by doing the following:

1. Comment on the post for one entry.
2. If you mention this contest on your blog AND send a trackback, then you receive three more entries, and
3. If you sign up for mymochamoney.com's RSS feed, you receive another three entries.

This is the fun part; promoting the contest.  I'm promoting the contest several ways.  I'm posting in forums, writing about the contest on hubpages, announcing it on Facebook, and submitting the post to Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati and other social networking websites.  I could also put together a short video and launch it on Youtube.  Since my contest award is a Garmin Streetpilot c330 GPS System (a nice long-tail keyword), and Google loves videos, I'm pretty sure I could be on the first page of Google in a few hours.  I'm already on the second page of Google for that keyword for the post about the contest (today is 12/17/08-go check it out).  If I do make a video, I will update this post to let you know if indeed it made it to the first page of Google. 

The big name bloggers run contests all the time and do quite well with them considering that they have thousands of readers.  They can get thousands of trackbacks to the contest post page and therefore increase their one-way links that will only make their blog more popular with the search engines.  I'm a little guy (gal) with a relatively new blog.  Will a contest help me?  Will giving away a Garmin Streetpilot c330 GPS System (newly refurbished I might add) have any effect on driving (no pun intended) more readers to my blog?

I will be sure to let you know!