Contest Ideas

[Blaine Moore]

A friend of mine just finished writing a book about my former team's relay run across the country (I'm so jealous that I wasn't willing to quit my job to go run with them...)

The official launch is in another week or two. I'm planning on giving a copy or two away, and was wondering what pointers you folk might have for running the contest to do so. The goals are of course to expose as many people to the book as I can that might not have otherwise heard of it, and also to try to use some buzz around it to increase the traffic to my site. I figure all of the alumni are going to help market it, so if I can get them to also say to people "by the way, you can win a free copy over at run to win" then I might be able to come out ahead traffic wise as well as helping my friend generate sales. I doubt at the time I run the contest that the book will be available in Amazon yet, and I'm not too worried about affiliate sales at this point.

My inclination is to have a thread announcing the contest, and then have folk post a comment to be entered. I might do multiple threads and give people an extra chance each day (one comment per thread), or (if some other alumni step up and agree to purchase copies for folk) I might give a book a day away. I want to be able to cater to random search engine traffic that is just stopping through and might not be inclined to go to a lot of work, while at the same time doing something that folk might have some fun with or might at least find memorable.

What suggestions do you have?

[Blaine Moore]

Okay, well, the contest is now live and running for a week.
I got my hardcover copy of the book yesterday and am enjyoing the third of it or so I've read so far.

If you are interested in the book or in seeing how I ran the contest, go over and try to win a free copy of Coast to Coast at my site.

I'll post results on how this affects my traffic in a couple weeks after I've had a chance to analyze it all.

[Blaine Moore]

Well, so far my traffic is up quite a bit despite only 4 people participating in the contest itself. The contest is getting the most traffic, which is nice. I had hit 100 people in one day for the first time last week, and yesterday I had around 135 or so folk visit and that is without me posting anything new until right before I went to bed.

[Yaro]

This has turned out to be a good little traffic test in a very specific niche. Keep the updates coming Blaine.

[Blaine Moore]

Well, it's been about a month, and the contest coincided with a nice spike in traffic. About a week before I began the contest, my traffic started going up anyway, and I was pretty active promoting the site during that time. I manage to about double my daily average traffic, and most of that has stuck around despite not being overly active for 2 or 3 weeks due to the inevitable responsibilities outside of the internet world.

Not too bad, though. The person who won the contest wound up being an underclassmen on my old college team, so he wrote on his site that he thought it was fixed. Little did he know that I was very fair with my awarding the book, and that I'd actually been rooting for the woman that is going to officiate at my wedding to win the copy of the book. Heh.

Not a lot of actual submissions, but a lot of people looking at the post. It was worth the $20 or so I spent on it, I'd say. My site is not very well monetized right now so I didn't come close to getting that back from it, but I'm still getting between 50% and 100% of the traffic on top of what I had coming two months ago.

I need to find a contest I can run that will cost a bit less. Like somebody offering to give books away through my site with me just brokering the winners to the producer. That'd be nice.

[Yaro]

Thanks for sharing the case study Blaine - it's always cool to see how tests go. We need more posts like this here at the forums.

[Blaine Moore]

Another side effect of the contest, which has also probably been influenced by the new spambot for wordpress, is that I am getting about 10-12 times the number of spam comments each day as I did before the contest.

In the past month, I have gotten over 4000 spam comments, compared with the couple of hundred I had had prior to the contest and since upgrading to wordpress 2.0.

Akismet has done a good job of catching about 95%+ of them. Only a dozen or so got through Akismet, and only a few of those got through my moderation queue.

[City SEO/M]

On one of my blogs, I had an interview with a prominent member of the community and offered people the opportunity to suggest questions, the best of which got in. Most of the questions were intelligent and relevant, so many people got something out of it, and I got a handful of links from the contest. If you offer a similar opportunity to interact, either via an interview, via some highlighting and free backlinking on your blog etc., you should see some decent participation.

This requires promotion, so speak to friendly bloggers and ask for a link to your contest post. I got 19 comments plus passionate emails from friends when I talked to people about my contest.