Running a Contest - Do & Don’ts

Posted on June 16, 2008, under Blogging, Contests by Ikki.

Hi everybody!

Running a Competition In the past few months, there has been a large wave of competitions going on at many blogs and sites out there. Authors, writers and sites’ owners are giving away a great variety of prizes to their readers in order to reward them for their loyalty and to keep new visitors coming back for more.

Why is it so good to run a competition, anyway?

Running a contest is a great way to build loyalty among your existing readers and it might also attract some new ones to your site. Think of it as a win-win relationship: give your visitors something back for their loyalty and they’ll reward you with traffic, popularity and even income from advertisements and sponsorships. Keep in mind that rewarding your visitors is also a way to show respect for them. Make them feel a part of your site.

Summary: why should I run a competition?

It’ll help you to build loyalty among your readers
It’ll attract more traffic to your site
It’ll generate some incomes from advertisement
It’ll make you gain experience and knowledge
It’ll get you a few new readers too!

Now, there are a couple of things you should consider when starting your own competition:

Do’s

Let people know about your contest: running a contest needs advertisement. You can either promote it by your self, ask your friends and relatives to help you spread the word, or simply hire someone to do the job for you.
Pick your prizes wisely: give away something that you would want to have for yourself. Prizes that have more relevancy to your site’s topic will do better than those that don’t.
Find a way to give value to your site: encourage people to add helpful/quality comments in your sites (eg: the best comment will win $100 via Paypal). Quality comments increase the value to your site!
Keep it simple: make your rules as simple as possible. Having elaborated rules to enter the competition could be a real turn off for your readers. Simple is better (eg. post a comment to enter the contest).
Keep it short: long contests increases the chance of participatition but it also tends to bore people. There’s no ideal length for a contest, however I’d say that a week or two are good enough to gain exposure for your competition and keep your visitors interested.

Dont’s

Change the rules: never ever do this. It’ll hurt your reputation badly and disappoint those who have entered your contest. While there might be a very good reason behind it, changing rules can do more harm than good in most cases.
Downgrade the prizes: adding more valuable prizes to your competition won’t cause you any harm. However, downgrading your prizes to something smaller / simpler / cheaper won’t do any good to your reputation.
Stop normal posting: running a competition can take a lot of time and effort. However, people will still come back to read what you have to say. Keep the normal posts flowing as the competition goes on.
Require a link back to your site: while getting a few backlinks is always appreciated, you might get penalized for it by Google and other SEs. Search engines are constantly tracking down sites that build up their backlinks artificially and punishes them by affecting their SERP (Search Engine Result Page - the listing of webpages returned by a search engine to a keyword query)

Final Words

Running a competition can be a great experience. You’ll surely make mistakes (you’re human, remember?) but you’ll also learn from them and make your next contests better and better each time. Your readers will appreciate that and in time your site will grow in reputation and traffic.

What do you think? Ever had similar experiences? what happened to you when you first ran a contest? Haven’t started one yet? Let me know what you think!

Cheers!

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7 Replies to "Running a Contest - Do & Don’ts"

Melvin on June 18, 2008

To admit I really despise contests, why? because oftentimes people do it improper. Contest is a nice way to build exposure to blogs however like anything i believe it should be done in moderation

Pankaj Agarwal on June 18, 2008

Stop normal posting: running a competition can take a lot of time and effort. However, people will still come back to read what you have to say. Keep the normal posts flowing as the competition goes on.
Require a link back to your site: while getting a few backlinks is always appreciated, you might get penalized for it by Google and other SEs. Search engines are constantly tracking down sites that build up their backlinks artificially and punishes them by affecting their SERP (Search Engine Result Page - the listing of webpages returned by a search engine to a keyword query)

1) Please explain me the STOP NORMAL POSTING.

2) About Link back, i think its not a bad thing because Search engines punishes only those who exchange links not those who buy links. Its just a link back to our blog, not a reciprocal link. Why its not good ?

Ikki on June 18, 2008

@Melvin: Not everyone can run a contest, I agree. People tend to do fool things like changing rules or downgrading the prizes just because they didn’t expect to get a determinated response from their readers/visitors.

Thanks for your comment!

Ikki on June 18, 2008

@Pankaj Agarwal: 1) What I tried to say is don’t stop normal posting. Keep posting like there was no contest running at all. People will still visit your site expecting to read something new, not only to participate on your contests.

2) I believe you’re wrong, mate. Buying links is also highly dangerous if it’s not done properly. A proof of that is that when people sell/buy links they never reveal the actual link on public. Why? Because Google might find out and ban you. Normally, the seller/buyer will give you the details via PM, email or another private way to let you know the necessary info to exchange links.

Reciprocal links aren’t that bad but you must make sure that it looks “natural” (eg. don’t leave any evidence of link trading on forums or sites). However, one-way linkbacks are better. You might want to use the attribute rel=nofollow on them, too!

Thanks for your comments

Sabeur on June 22, 2008

really helpful
The only problem is getting people involved

Ikki on June 22, 2008

@Sabeur: Yeah, promotion is maybe the hardest part of running a contest, even more if you’re doing it by yourself :S However, with some advertisement and realistic goals you should be fine

momo on June 27, 2008

This is a very good website, I like the content that you have. Keep up the good work.

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