Running a contest on your blog is a great way of generating buzz. Done correctly it will generate links, word-of-mouth and lots of goodwill. But lots and lots of people are doing them. So part of running a successful blog contest means raising the bar on the prizes you offer.

David Airey has taking blog contests to a new level. For his blog’s 1-year anniversary he’s announced over $4,000 in prizes collected from a host of sources, including myself.

I’ve offered (as a prize) a blog writing consultation. I’ll review 3-5 of your articles and provide tips and suggestions on improving them. I’ll be looking at your headlines, how you write, linking strategies, your use of images, structure of your posts and more. For good measure I’ll look at your blog headlines again.

I’ll also chat to you about social media and social networks and how you can use those to your benefit. There may be some you don’t know of that can work for your niche.

There are more prizes than I can highlight in this post — and David does a fine job listing them all — but here’s a quick taste:

• Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill of Nate Whitehill dot Com. Yes, your blog design matters.
• Personal marketing / advertising plan from Maki of Dosh Dosh. Maki writes infinitely more in-depth and valuable articles than I could ever possibly hope to do; go check out his stuff.
• One hour SEO consultation with Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO. I don’t know Lyndon, but I’m a strong believer in SEO and writing content to attract the social media crowds.
• One hour product launch consultation with Design Translator (DT) of Design Sojourn.
• 30 day text link ad shown site-wide on Contest Blogger. I don’t know how successful a text link ad on their site will be, but I like the idea behind Contest Blogger (I had a similar idea – never launched.)

I won’t expand on the details of how you enter the contest. It’s easy enough, it will generate tons of links for David (good on you!) and it should be a blast.

Go check out David’s 1-year anniversary blog contest. Good luck!