Amazing
Business
Ideas!

A lot (and I mean a lot) of people are trying to make money by blogging, myself included with several niche blogs and some really, really general ones! Some make a reasonable amount of cash everyday, some have good days and bad days, and some never see a single visitor!

Announcing yourself to the world and getting links to your site from other prominent bloggers to build your reputation is both time consuming and requires a certain degree of patience (something not everyone has!).

However, a recent trend by several blogs I’ve visited has been to launch a competition, a “comment on this blog post and link to it and be drawn at random from the people entered”, if the prize is good enough it’s a sure fire way of creating a bit of buzz around your site and getting it discussed far and wide across the blogosphere.

This post is exactly that, an entry into the competition over at BusinessBlogger.net to win $500, second prize is a graphics card (a bit random, but I’m sure it’s a worthy prize to some).

Alright, why are they doing this? They’ve just launched Business+Directory, a business directory and have a special offer in that for the entire month of February they’ll be doing free reviews - they need a bit of publicity and this is it! As they normally charge $49 for a request to be included in the directory (whether you get accepted or not - this is quite a good deal!).

The competition requires a minimum of 50 entrants to ensure that the $500 is paid out, so if you’re reading this and thinking $500/£250 would come in quite handy around now, then what are you waiting for - get entered!

If you’re thinking of launching a site in the near future, why not think about a competition to publicise it?

Are you ready? With only 244 days to go until the big day, you should really start preparing now.

When we discussed the prospect of April being a quiet month in a previous post, I started to think about Christmas! As a rough guideline, I always think you should really start promoting your business for Christmas in the early weeks of November. That’s a full six weeks before the big day (pretty close to my birthday so that’s always a wake-up call for me!).

That leaves us with around 200 days from now, I’m betting it will take at least six weeks, maybe even eight, to come up with your marketing idea, rip that idea up, come up with a new idea, discuss it with colleagues, and then start work on it (we all know it happens!). So in eight weeks time (with around 150 days to go), you’ll start work on your idea!

Let’s say once you’ve created your idea it’s going to take three weeks, maybe four, for you to actually do the implementation (whether that be getting it onto your website, leaflets delivered, new stock in etc.), it needs to be ready go in early October!

Ouch! You are really starting to run out of days!

So, your knew idea will be ready for you to work on in eight weeks time, and you have to have it ready for October. That gives you around 130 days to actually create your idea, in the summer months (June-August) when I’m really betting you don’t want to be sat inside at a computer screen, looking at pictures of Santa!

So if I were you, and you’re having a quiet period now start thinking about Christmas - it’s really not that far away!

If you want to discuss Christmas Promotional ideas, please comment below!