After running the contest to celebrate my blog’s first birthday I realized that I made a few mistakes in the execution of the blog contest that I have since had some time to reflect on. So as a result of that contest I’ve come up with a list of 5 lessons that I learned from running my blog contest that I believe will help improve the effectiveness of your blog’s contests as well.
1. Define your contest goal(s)
Before starting a blog contest you should clearly define the goal of the contest. What are you trying to accomplish?
Do you want people to post about your contest and receive some link backs?
Do you want to increase your RSS subscriber count?
Do you want to encourage more participation?
It’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with your blog contest otherwise it won’t be as effective. I never really set out to define the goals of my blog’s contest and so I ended up with a contest that I ran but without any strong numbers to shoot for. If you set specific and measurable goals for your blog contests you’ll see improved your results because you’re more invested in the outcome.
2. Simplify the contest
First and foremost make it easy for your readers to participate in your blog’s contest. Don’t create a laundry list of hoops your readers have to jump through, but at the same time you don’t want to innundate them with too many ways to enter. If your contest is relatively small like mine was, try providing only one way for readers to enter your blog’s contest. If your primary goal is to increase your RSS subscriber count than use that criteria as the only way to win prizes in the contest. The size of the prize pool should also help you to determine what you should require your readers to accomplish. Because if you’re not offering a lot of prizes than it will be hard to get people to put forth the effort and write about your contest.
On the flip side you don’t want to make it too easy to enter the contest. The perfect example here is just requiring readers to write a single comment on a post to enter the contest. While this makes it incredibly easy for readers to participate I wouldn’t recommend using this entrance method exclusively even if your blog is really small.
3. Offer more prizes
With the contest I ran I offered five 125×125 blog ads on the sidebar along with a 468 x 60 ad. These prizes came out to a total cash value of $140. This is a fairly small sum of money and it doesn’t really bring about a strong call to action to participate in the contest. Looking back at how many people entered the contest I can see how this contest served more of my current readers as opposed to bringing in a ton of new subscribers and link backs. Perhaps a few people subscribed to my RSS feed that were sitting on the fence, but again if I offered more prizes I could have seen much stronger results.
4. Set a deadline that provides plenty of time for readers to enter
I ran my blog’s birthday contest for only two and a half weeks, which doesn’t allow for a long time to enter a contest. Granted, I already knew that the prizes I was offering weren’t really that huge but I should have ran the contest for at least one month to grant plenty of time for people to read about and enter the contest.
If you’re running a really large contest than you may want also want to consider running it for a couple months to not only provide ample time people to participate but to also provide a lot of “face time” for the sponsors of your contest. The lengthy deadline will also give you more time to heavily promote the blog contest as well which leads me into my next point.
5. Promote your blog contest
Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog contest. One way you can promote your blog’s contest is through advertising on your own blog. I did this for my past contest by creating a couple simple banners. By promoting the contest through your own blog it will help to inform any new readers that may have missed the initial contest announcement post. Another way to promote the contest is by mentioning it in the bottom of each post during the run of the contest i.e:
I’m running a contest to celebrate my blog’s birthday. Subscribe to my RSS feed for your chance to win free advertising on ChrisGuthrie.net
Another option that should work well is if you’re offering such a large prize pool that people are much more inclined to write about your contest for a better shot at the prizes. This will help to further promote your contest but will only work well if the prize pool is significant.
Wrapping it up
Overall, I know that the next blog contest I run will take into account some of the lessons I’ve learned above and I’m sure I’ll learn even more the next time around. I don’t plan to run any more “small” blog contests in the future though as I want to go for something much bigger next time.
What do you think of the lessons I’ve learned? Have they helped you think about how you’ll run your next blog contest?
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