The importance of competition

This is the forth in a series of articles in which I hope to share with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

In economic terms, competition breeds quality, choice, low price, innovation and efficiency. In blogging terms its a great way to increase your long-term commenters and therefore your reader base too.

When starting up a new blog encouraging competition is one of the best ways to engage your readers and attract new ones; fast.

If my memory serves me right, from day 1 Technology Bloggers had a ‘Top Commentators’ widget at the bottom of every page on the blog, displaying links to those people who had commented the most. If you have never seen it, scroll down and take a look, or just take a look at this screen shot 🙂

Last month Antonia was the top commenter followed by Adrian from Shed Plans, Pete, Anna and finally Diana from Elephant’s Eye. All the people mentioned have dofollow links on every page of Technology Bloggers, to a site of their choosing. But, it’s only the top commenters who get this privilege. This encourages people to visit the blog, to read and comment more to get links back to their site.

You could argue that people will just throw out any random rubbish in their comments and get to the top with ease, but I won’t allow this. Our commenters know (or they should) that I rigorously check through every comment on this blog – with a little help from our spam filters.

So basically what I am getting at is that if you want to encourage more people to comment, use a top commenters widget plugin. I have our widget reset every month as this means that someone can’t get so far ahead that they are almost impossible to catch up!

In the past I have thanked everyone who has contributed to Technology Bloggers success. This includes dofollow links to commenters and authors sites, further incentive to comment.

In the future I have plans to introduce competitions to the blog, where entrants will be rewarded in some way or another for participating. I believe that this will also encourage more people to visit the blog, as competition gets people excited, it gets people interested, and it makes people want to stick around.