Winning The Web held one of the craziest blog contests I have ever seen, and gave out $14,575 in cash and prizes! Kudos to Gyutae Park for thinking outside of the box, and bringing in so many big-name sponsors to pony up prizes for this contest. Talk about link bait, I saw mention of the contest on EVERY blog I visited over the past month. And the icing on the cake was the perfectly timed April Fools joke, where Gyutae convinced readers that a sponsor had stepped up and was offering a Hummer H2 as a prize!

As people entered his contest, his RSS readership grew considerably. A good majority of them will continue to read the site, which was the motivation behind this contest. Mission accomplished!

Blog contests are nothing new, but Gyutae’s received a TON of attention because of the massive amount of prizes he was giving away. And he’s not the only one who benefited from it – The sponsors also received a lot of coverage (and backlinks), for a relative bargain.. Definitely something to think about the next time you’re solicited for a giveaway.