Awards as promotion methods

Awards are small, sometimes animated pictures that have a little bit of text and some cute graphics in them. They are a bit like trophies from sport events - one would easily believe that they have no actual purpose and are just designed to look good and to make the owner proud of himself.

Is it that simple? Well, if it were you wouldn't have to read this article. Awards actually have a function, but the way they work is not quite common knowledge. Even many webmasters who have awards on their sites don't have a clue on what is actually happening.

Let's start by looking this topic from the award winner's side. What does he actually get? Well, first of all he receives the graphic that the award distributor has made. Only in rare occasions it has any value; unless the site that gave it is extremely known and respected, the graphic alone will not raise the prestige of the winning page. Second, the winner usually receives a link from the site that gave the award. The value of this link depends on where it is placed and how much traffic the link page gets. If it's a prominent link on a busy site, it's worth something. If it's a tiny link on a low-traffic site, it won't do the winner much good.

Alright, we've pretty much covered what the winner gets. Now we'll cover what the guy who gave the award gets. That's right, he actually benefits from giving them, it's not like he's doing it because he loves the humanity. He does it because if done right, giving out awards can be a really good promotion method. Why? Because that way, he can gain two important things. First, he gets a boost in his link popularity because he of course requests people to link the award back to his site and just about every winner obeys without giving it a second thought. This boost in link popularity helps him in appearing near the top in search engines, although it seems that new link popularity algorithms favor links from related sites and might ignore links from unrelated sites.

He also gets some visitors trough the awards on other people's sites. Sure, not many people click on an award, but if he gives out 1000 of them and every one gets clicked just twice a month, that's 2000 visitors/month for the site right there!

In conclusion, the guy giving out awards usually benefits more from them than the one receiving the award. If you're planning to apply for awards, prefer big sites that offer a prominent link on their site for winners. If you want, you might also try to win smaller awards just to gain some links. Don't even think about placing the actual awards on your site; the real prize is the link you'll get from the site that gives the award, not the award itself.

On the other hand, if you're planning to hand out awards, it might be a good idea. There are plenty of guys out there who haven't read this article and will gladly accept just about any award, place it on their site and link it to your site. The only thing you'll need is graphic skills to make the award picture and a set of linking instructions to pass out to the "lucky" winners. It might be wise to limit the sites that can apply for the award to the ones with a similar topic as your site so that you will gain a lot of relevant, not random, links that will help you in your search engine related promotion efforts.

To find awards you can win (keep my advice in mind and don't be fooled by the pretty award pictures), go to Award sites. If you're giving out an award of your own, you may also submit it there in order to drive more award-hungry people to your site.