It’s time for another online case study. This time we will be looking at WinningTheWeb.com, an internet marketing blog that is running a truly crazy contest, offering over $12,200 in cash and prizes.

Being featured in this type of study on Court’s Internet Marketing School is a paid service that I created to help businesses to reach the next level. Most sites never get there, and these reviews can help you to expose the errors that are holding you back. You should be able to learn a lot by reading these studies, or you can buy your own review if you would like me to take a look at your site.

Let’s Start With The Contest

This is definitely one of the bigger contests I’ve seen and WinningTheWeb is giving away some really great prizes including a few thousands dollars in cash, some trips to a few cool conferences, and some memberships to some really great sites.

Using a contest is a great way to promote your site, as long as you set it up properly. This contest is pretty big and has some great prizes so there’s no doubt that it will work out well. If you take a look at how the contest is set up you might be able to figure out how this contest will probably not cost anything to run. I have to give props for a well thought out idea.

Branding/Domain Name

I have to say that I really like ‘Winning The Web’ as a brand and domain. The site is also set up well - this is a good example of a site that uses a free WordPress theme, but still looks very unique. This is probably because of the unique logo they are using.

One thing that I noticed while looking through this site is that you can find some posts that have great titles on this site:

• 9 BIG Methods to Pump Up Your Blog Comments
• How an SEO can Prepare for Microhoo, the Microsoft-Yahoo Combo
• 11 Ways to Maximize Your Blog’s Subscriber Count
• 6 Things You Don’t Know (but think you know) about SEO
• 6 Reasons Why Taking Extreme Measures Will Flourish Your Site

Titles such as these have a very positive effect on your site’s branding. No matter what industry your site or blog is in, make sure you create good content that uses great titles.

SEO Strategy

WinningTheWeb has decided to go with ‘internet marketing strategy’ as its main keyword. The homepage of the site is doing a pretty good job of targeting the keyword, in fact you will find the keyword in the HTML title, H1 tags, as well as within the text of the homepage.

I would add a link in the footer that points to the homepage using ‘Internet Marketing Strategy’ as the anchor text. This will get the keyword on each page in the site and will help with the keyword authority of the entire site.

In order to pass more PageRank to the important pages of the site, I would add nofollows to the ‘About’ page, the ‘Advertise’ page, and the ‘T-Shirts’ page. These pages won’t rank for anything anyway, so there’s no reason to point site-wide links at them.

Overall

This site overall is already on its way and has over 700 readers through RSS. I would expect this site to continue to grow well. This site is a good example of what hard work, creative thinking, and good writing can do.