Holding blog contests can greatly improve traffic to your website or blog. If you have a product for sale, offering free samples as a reward/prize can increase publicity even more.

The blogging community tend to love giveaways and I have been on the receiving end of one with my Winning The Web T-shirt last week.

One of the best known bloggers out there, John Chow, is currently holding a contest alongside Bic Promotional Pens and is giving away two Flip Video cameras. In order to be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is reply to John Chow’s post here for one point into the contest and blog about the contest (like I’ve done here) in exchange for an additional five entries.

Contests like these are exceptional for promotion of new products and are a great way to expose your website and brand to more people. A website selling Bic Pens will be expecting a lot of traffic from this contest; with great exposure on John Chow’s blog and then posts like this one to further boost their brand, it is not directly marketed at their existing customers and looks to increase their market considerably over the next month.

Best of luck to everybody, although I would really like one of those cameras and don’t forget my current contest where you get a link in my blogroll (wow, I really do need better prizes!)