So, you wanna win a blogging contest. Most contests believe in a random lucky draw at the end of the contest to determine who gets the prize. So, how can you increase your chances of winning?

Well…my tip is to participate in as many contests as possible. Sooner, than later, lady luck is going to come your way. There is no back door entry that I know of. I guess I got a little carried away with the title of this article! :-)

The next question is how to determine where these contests are taking place?

ContestBlogger has the ‘ultimate list‘ of 23 blogs that focus on bringing you a comprehensive list of blog contests across the blogosphere. Just choose the contests that you want to participate it, and increase your chances of finally winning a prize.

All the best…. :-)

Are you interested in winning yourself a great looking logo for your blog? I’m sure the answer is YES!!!

The PrizeBlog is running a “The Win A Logo Contest” till 17th October. You still have 3 weeks to enter the draw.

If you’re declared the winner in a lucky draw, you get the logo designed from SOS Factory.

To enter the draw, all you need to do is write a blog post about it, just like this one.

As you can see, I’ve been promoting BlogRush a fair bit recently. I do think they have something good going on which might be successful. Just like in my previous post, only time will tell whether they succeed or not! One thing is for sure, if they succeed, it should help bloggers get more targeted traffic to their site.

A few days back BlogRush had released what they called “Flavours“.

This allows you to customize the “skin” of the widget without having to change any code on your site. Just a configuration change at your BlogRush Dashboard will do the trick.

This should help you blend in the widget into your blog theme.

There is a new “Top 100” list for blogs that has been launched recently. It uses a combination of Alexa Ranking, Google Page Rank, Technorati, and User Voting to determine the Top 100 list.

Vote for Online Presence on this list. It is listed as “Online Presence (Blog Sailor)“.Thanks!

I never got around to incorporating Google AdSense for Search on this blog, even though Google provides a set of nifty tools to get this done in no time.

After reading an article on Google Custom Search, I made it a point to finally get that migration done. If you notice on the sidebar, you’ll now see a Google Search box rather than the standard WordPress search box.

Try searching for “Make Money Online” and you’ll get all results specific to those phrases on this site. At the same time, you might notice that there are advertisements showing up in the search results. Here lies the possibility of making money online for absolutely no additional work. Google Custom Search Engine allows you to link your AdSense account to the search engine, so that you get paid for any clicks on the advertisements.

Isn’t this easy?? It took me just 10 minutes to make the migration, that’s it!

If you are not using Google Custom Search yet, please do incorporate it right away on your blog. The results are much better than the inbuilt WordPress search, and you stand the chance of making money as well. Its a deadly combination!

BlogRush was launched recently by John Reese and the amount of attention it has received is just amazing. I don’t think any other site of its category has ever received the kind of attention that BlogRush received.

For those not aware, BlogRush calls itself a ‘Blog Syndication Network’. Basically, you show one of their widgets on your site (you can see it on the sidebar), and for every impression their widget gets, you get impressions of your blog on our blog sites. This can help generate some additional traffic to your site.

It works on the pyramid structure, i.e., you get a percentage of syndications each time your referral’s site shows the widget. So, the higher you are in the pyramid structure, in theory, you should get that much more traffic.

So does BlogRush work? I’ve had a few people sign up under me and I’ve seen only a small inflow of traffic from this widget. So, it is worth the effort of putting on your site? I think its too soon to say. My blog is not a very high traffic blog (yet!), but even then I have a spare credits in BlogRush. What that means is that they are not able to show my listings on their widgets enough times for all the credits I’ve earned!!! That’s not a good sign for sure. Rather than credits piling up, I would prefer it getting exhausted the moment its earned.

Lets wait and watch how BlogRush grows or falls…

Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline.

Here are some of the features that are now included within Google Reader:

• A front page that lets you see new items at a glance
• Import and export subscription lists as an OPML file
• Keyboard shortcuts for main functions
• Choice between list view or expanded view for item viewing (showing either just the story title or with a description, respectively)
• Automatic marking of items as read as they are scroll past (expanded view only)
• Search in all feeds, across all updates from subscriptions

If you use Google Reader to manage your feed subscriptions, you’re going to like this one. The image below shows the keyboard shortcuts for most of the commonly available functions in Google Reader. If you are a power user or aim to be one, these keyboard shortcuts can make you navigate through your feeds much faster without using a mouse!!

If you need help at any given time in Google Reader, just press “?”.

Simple and sweet…