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 🙂

Technology Bloggers top commenters in June 2011Last 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.

16 thoughts on “The importance of competition

  1. You have a great approach to the way you treat people in your blog. You really respect your every visitor which is a rare case for the Internet where blog owners simply ignore visitors. Thanks for your attitude indeed!

    • Christopher (admin team)

      I am glad you like my attitude DiNaRa 🙂

      That’s what I think a good blog really boils down to – respect.

  2. It is always great to have people commenting in a blog. This can keep the blog lively and the readers to respond. I don’t really like the type of blogs that no people commenting despite good traffic. Technology Bloggers should keep up what had been done so far. Well Done.

    • Christopher (admin team)

      *BLUSH* – thanks 😉
      “…this is just the beginning…” – owww, sounds exciting, I can’t wait to see what is yet to come!

  3. Competition is great, but it involves the competitors to actually want to compete. There has to be a tangible prize for serious competition to arise.
    I eagerly await for you to make those modifications regarding the rewards, that will be really fun.

  4. It seems a great way to increase a traffic to the website and even build a regular readers for the blog. Commentluv itself is an encouraging factors for fellow commentators to leave a worth while comment on the topic, apart from them top commentators may increase the competition factors among the fellow commentators.

    • Christopher (admin team)

      Hence the reason this blog uses the CommentLuv plugin 🙂

      Thanks for stopping by, reading my article and adding your opinion!

      I hope to see you around again soon 🙂
      Christopher – Admin Team

  5. Hi,

    Nice way showing appreciations for your readers. For bloggers it feels great to see that your readers are actually interested in what you posted and for readers its great to be appreciated. Nice job and Keep posting and we’ll be reading.

    • Christopher (admin team)

      Thanks for the support Tom 🙂

      Always good to see a new face around here, welcome to the community!
      Christopher – Admin Team

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