Setting up a blog contest and running it successfully is not always a trend seen everywhere. Many blog contests fail and many go ahead of the success. It all depends on how much participation is required, what are the prizes and the most important, How much are you promoting your contest?
I am running a blog contest right now, and have tried most of the below ways, so sharing my experience.

In my view, these are the ways to promote your blog contest -

• Post in webmaster forums
• Guest blogging
• Submit to blog contests blogs
• Commenting on other blogs
• Press Release
• Advertising

Now lets go deep into each of them -
Webmaster forums - There are lot of webmaster forums all around, some of which are digitalpoint forums, v7n forums, webmaster-talk.com, webmasterworld.com and many others. A few are related just to blogging such as bloggeries forums, bloggertalk etc.
These forums are always active and have many bloggers as members who might be happy to see a new contest. Be active in webmaster forums, gain popularity and reputation so that people believe in your contest and try to participate in.

Guest blogging - Guest blogging in big blogs can bring in some buzz and good quality traffic to our blog, and specifically this can bring in right traffic when we guest blog in other blogs to promote our contest. Jason from TUK is one of the examples, who lately had guest blogged in John Cow, Tyler Cruz, Super Blogging Tips and Bloggin-Ads which had generated some great traffic to his blog and contest.

Submitting the blog contest - This is one of the best ways to promote a blog contest. There are many blogs related only to blog contests and they post only about these contests. All we need to do is to submit some information about the contest. Here is a list of few blogs which accept blog contests promotion for free.

Commenting - An easy way to get minimal traffic from other blogs is by commenting in their posts. And a tricky way is to post controversial comments, like you don’t agree to some facts of the post and why! Simple comments like “Nice post, i agree.” etc. won’t help in getting traffic. When you look different from others, then you can get some buzz there.

Press Release - This can be done when you have something huge to give away, not like the usual prizes given by other blogs too. Press releases can send you great traffic if your offer and contest is really catchy and wonderful.

Advertising - Advertising in other blogs, in forums through ads using ad programs like adwords, blogads, entrecard etc. These can be done for a few days and they can assure you good quality traffic that might be interested in your contest. Entrecard is a new system that is working very well and majority of bloggers are using it.

I am using most of the steps above, except guest posting, as i am not upto the standard of having high quality write-ups. The results till now have been good and i hope to see more exposure to the contest.