Whenever you enter a contest you should be in it to win it.

This is my motto for the guest blogger contest at BlogEngage which is powered by Brian. On November 23rd, 2010 a contest was launched at BlogEngage with a share of $1,200 in cash prize to be won along with other great things to be had.

In order for me to win the contest, or at least stand a chance in winning, I had to have a few strategies for myself to take on this contest. All contests need a really good strategy in order to win and if you fail to do this then you will fail to win.

Here are my plans and strategies to winning this contest.

How I Plan To Win

I had missed the first BlogEngage guest blogger contest so I had prepared ahead of time to enter the second contest. I had to do this by writing my article way ahead of time which was during the first contest. So instead of writing my article and submitting it late to the first contest, I wrote my article and submitted it early for the second contest.

I had prepared for this contest way ahead of time, so when the contest was launched my article was the first to be published. In truth and in fact it’s always best to prepare things ahead of time for everything that you are doing, especially if you want to win a contest, just like how I want to win the BlogEngage guest post contest.

The next thing I did was to approach this contest with an open mind. This contest is open to any and every BlogEngage member and we all know that you can find some of the best bloggers on the web over at BlogEngage. I know I’m not one of the best bloggers on the web, but did this scare me from entering the contest? No way!!!

As I said, “ this contest is open to any and every BlogEngage member” and I am one of the proud member so I have all rights to enter, so I did.

So far my guest post (How To Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral) has been getting lots of great response from the community and I happy that they have enjoyed my article. If you have not had the chance to read it as yet, they you should click here to read it. In that post I gave some great tips on how you can get tons of traffic to your blog.

I needed to make my guest post stand out and pull readers towards it. I had to develop a great headline to catch the eyes of visitors, write excellent content that appeals to them, write to please them in many different ways, use images that goes hand in hand with my article and make sure the correct keywords are there to pull in search engine traffic.

I wrote my post with great sub-headings and broke up those headings into paragraphs to make it easier to scan through if you want to pick out a point that you want to read. I also included a group discussion at the end of my post so I can get my readers involved in a discussion so that I can get the BlogEngage community to comment on my article.

I spread the word about my guest post by submitting it to all the social media sites that I use. I regularly publish it on my Facebook fan page and also my profile, I tweet about it on Twitter, I Digged it, bookmarked it on Delicious, stumbled it on StumbleUpon, submit to SERPd and many more sites.

Why did I do this? This is because social media sites brings lots of traffic and I wanted my guest post out there so that everyone could see it.

A part of the rules for the guest post is that you should blog about it, and I think this is fair enough so that you can help spread the word about the contest. As soon as my guest post was published I blogged about it so that I can get some traffic to my post as well. I am also blogging about it right now in this post. So blogging about a contest that you have entered to get some of your blog traffic to it can also boost your chances of winning.

On Twitter, I have just over 420 followers. I tweet my guest post link asking my followers to please read and make a comment. I also send personal DM messages asking for retweets which has worked well for me. So I want to thank my followers who has retweeted my article and voted for me.

If you notice at the end of every post on my blog I have a plugin which I use to promote my guest post. This plugin is called Call To Action which I can use to promote just about anything. In this plugin I get to add a 125px image, a link, link description, a description about what I am promoting and also a title. So this is another great way of promoting my guest post.

Group Discussion

If you have not voted for my article as yet, I’m asking please for your help. Here are ways that you can help me below: