It’s nothing complicated, just simple thinking. I like to call it… Contest Arbitrage!!!

The way contests work most on the time on the majority of webmaster/MMO blogs is that participants will have an option to blog about the contest, including links to the sponsors’ websites, and to place a link to a sponsors’ website. In contests where the prize is big enough (which is usually in contests with over $50 in prizes), there are usually 10-15 bloggers at bare minimum who will post about the contest in order to gain as many entries as they can. These blogs are all registered in Technorati and crawled frequently by Google.

Something as simple as a 30 text link on your blogroll will be accepted as a sponsored prize, and therefore basically you are trading in one 30-day outbound link for 15 permanent inbound links. If you can allow for 8 links in your blogroll, that’s an extra 120 permanent links to your blog per month. Not long ago I was talking about how easily Technorati Authority can be manipulated, and this is yet another way in which this occurs, gaining you hundreds of blog reactions and authority points each and every month.

Through this method you can also have some control over your anchor text (although don’t use just one keyword the whole time, Google will penalize you – John Chow experienced this first hand).

Stick around for the contest, I will be launching it on Saturday, and Santa’s going to be giving away a lot of goodies.