I have to admit it, bloggers are getting a lot better at promoting their contests. They know that a contest doesn’t do them much good if no one knows about it and what better way to get people talking about your contest than by ordering a ReviewMe review from John Chow dot Com? Well, that is exactly what Sabahan.com did.
Win a Free Domain & Free Hosting for Your WordPress Blog
Sabahan.com is holding a contest targeted towards bloggers. The winners will get free domain names and free WordPress blog hosting for life. That’s right, for life!
To participate in the contest, write a review of Sabahan.com and post it to your blog. For every five entries Sabahan.com received, one winner will be selected at random to win a free domain name. Once they have five domain name winners, those winners will go into drawing for a free WordPress blog hosting for life. The draw will be repeated for every five new domain name winners. Those are actually pretty good odds when you calculate it out.
Your review must be at least 200 words long and link to the Sabahan.com home page, the contest page and at least one other post. When linking to the other post, you should use the post title as the anchor text. That’s actually a really smart way of doing it. I doubt Google will try to slap Sabahan.com the way they tried to slapped me (which doesn’t seem to be working since my traffic is as high as ever).
Who is Sabahan.com
Sabahan.com is a blog about computers, the Internet, blogging, marketing and interesting stuff. The blog is the work of Gaman (no last name) who has been working part time on the Internet since 1997 and went full time in 1999. Gaman started Sabahan.com last January to give out tips and help bloggers make money online. Some of Garman’s moneymaking posts include:
- 10 AdWords Split Testing Ideas for Better CTR
- How to Make More Money from AdSense with Fewer Ad Units
- 10 Tips to Help You Make Money With Google Referral 2.0
- 10 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn’t Making Money from Text-Link-Ads.com
- Can Your Competitor Really Sabotage SEO Rankings?
- Digg Traffic vs Google Traffic – An AdSense Click Through Rates Analysis
- Read This Before You Attend Any Internet Marketing or Blogging Seminar
- Which One Is More Effective – Long or Short Posts?
- Display Targeted AdSense Ads Behind Password Protected Areas On Your Site
- The Top 6 Questions You Need to Ask If Your Blog Isn’t Making Any Money
Sabahan.com is updated multiple times per day and offers a full feed RSS.
Recommendations for Improvement
Sabahan.com needs to improve his about page. The page tells more about the state of Malaysia than it does about its author. It would be nice if we knew Gaman’s full name. This helps to build trust and brand the blogger. The about page should tell the blogger’s story and not give a geography lesson.
Garman doesn’t show the full blog post on the front page. Instead, only the first 100 words or so are displayed and readers must click a read more link to read the rest of the entry. I don’t think Sabahan.com does enough post per day to justify doing this. When you do click the read more link, you’re greeted with 300×250 Google ads taking up the left side of the post. This is really distracting and I wish he would move it to the right. In my tests, there isn’t a big difference in click rate between having the Google ad on the left vs. having it on the right.
Other than the distracting 300×250 Google ad, Sabahan.com has done a good job placing the other advertisements on the blog. He displays his link sponsors near the top and I would be interested to find out how the Google AdLink is doing for him. I also really like his integration of the Google search box into the blog.
Overall, I like Sabahan.com enough to add it to my feed reader. I guess this post also enters me into his win a free blog hosting for life contest. If I do win, I’ll donate it to a needy blogger.
Did you enjoy this post? Get John Chow Dot Com updates via email...
Stay up to date with all of John Chow’s tips for making money online and blog posts by subscribing via email. Your email will be kept private and never shared with anyone.
One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would-be bloggers never start their blogs...