http://clickonthenatdotcom.blogspot.com

Yeah, pretty much – How can you do that in vB on a user by user basis? Then how do you pick the winner? I assume you’d be looking at 1000’s of “entries.”

Glad to see you still feel contests merit use as a form of traffic dev, and I’m sure, links – despite what others have said.

We launched our NEW site just over 1 year ago. We had no visitors, a very small budget ($1000) and no income. But, with all this against us, we launched a contest with over $6000 in prizes because I knew it could pay for itself in the long run (by the time it came to pay up!).

Well, it did that, and much more. Within nine months we had a PR6, and by the time judging the contest came around, our traffic was sufficient to pay for the awards with two to three weeks of visitors. The rest was profit. We now have over 20,000 links in Yahoo, several hundred in Google, and traffic is over 15K pageviews per day.

Basically, our idea was to have a contest for bloggers to write about their home improvement project, with a single criteria of providing a link to any helpful resource on our site.

We had over 100 entries (disqualified 40 or so), and got all kinds of links and traffic from contest directory sites we submitted our contest to. We also provided ‘Vote For Me’ buttons for contestants to add to their site, to link to their entry on our site – this drove lots of traffic too. :) We made great relationships with a few high profile websites to be our judges, many of them linked to us too… We also hired Eric Ward to provide his URLWire service, got some ReviewMe reviews…

And the rest is very profitable history.

I highly recommend a WELL PLANNED contest for generating exposure, interest, traffic and links. Trust me. A poorly planned contest will have you emptying your pockets before you can say, “George Bush sucks – vote for Ron Paul!”

http://www.alistercameron.com/2007/04/11/case-study-how-to-run-a-great-competition-on-your-blog/

This is a case study I write last year on the same matter.

By all accounts, this competition ran really well, but I’ll let Paul Marek, who ran it, tell you himself in a comment here or elsewhere.

To those who say you can’t do it if you don’t have Darren’s “network”… think again. A Digg front page or various other “attainable” viral/marketing strategies are up to your creativity and “genius spark”, not the size of your network.

Anyway, a good idea will get promoted by the Darrens of this world to their networks, anyway… just look at the buzz around the manilamac.com site and product at the moment!!

- Alister

I’ve seen that done too Darren, offering a Playstation3 or something to kick-start their blog without having a sufficient delivery method to get the message out there.

It’s all well and good having a wicked competition ready but if you’ve got no network to announce it to, it’s not going to go very far. Unless you take it viral by offering people more chances to win by referring more friends – that can work.

Provided you have a few readers to begin with that is.

http://neilduckett.com/new-canon-ixy-digital-2000is-i-want-one/

I ran a competition giving away my less than 12 month old IXY 1000.

Also, having a look at DPS i see you have noted it as 12.7meg whereaas it’s actually 12.1 … a typo no dounbt but saves people asking questions later.

one mistake I see bloggers making is launching a ‘big’ competition with massive prizes when they don’t have a big audience to justify it. Start with a small giveaway – then build from there. I write more about this in the previous competition posts.

I’ve noticed a similiar problem myself – small blogs holding great competitions but virtually nobody entering so I decided to create blogetition. Basically we list all the blog competitions we can find, this way we can match up those hold competitions with those wanting to join them and win some fabulous prizes.

If you have a competition yourself, RT, I’d recommend submitting it to the site and hopefully you’ll see some extra traffic/participants coming your way.

Any tips there?

RT

There are also about 15 good contest blogs that you can submit to (a few pages in Google will show you them). I will probably make a post listing them all soon.