Not too long ago, blog contests were rare and all you had to do was put up a bit of cash or a small prize to have all of your readers writing mammoth reviews about your site. Then you sat back and watched the traffic flow in…

But times have changed!

It seems that almost every blog has a contest in one form or another these days and if you want to run a successful and profitable contest you really need to make it special!

How will you make your contest stand out? By having the best contest strategy!

Make it really easy to enter

With thousands of blog contests being run it becomes a lot more difficult to have the entry requirements being to review your site or complete a complex task. With most readers not wanting to fill their site with competition entries you have to ask yourself “Why will they enter my competition instead of someone else’s?“.

There are two aspects of your contest that will make it more attractive than another competition:

1. Your prize is better.
2. Your competition is easier to enter.

Having a great prize is a guaranteed way to encourage entries to your competition but it has the problem of decreasing your return on the contest. In contrast, having a contest that is incredibly easy to enter has the potential to encourage entries without diminishing your return.

Most people are lazy

Consider this example from Kevin’s competition in June on Blogging Tips:

What i want is people to guess the number of page views BloggingTips will have on Webalizer on June 20th 2007 divided by the total number of posts the forums has at the end of the 20th .

Therefore i am looking for

Guess = (Number of page views) / (Number of Total forum posts)

Personally, I feel that this competition was quite difficult to enter as it required a fair bit of research for the entrant and then a mathematical calculation. That takes time and effort and makes people less inclined to enter. Although the prize was $100, I don’t think Kevin was entirely happy with the response that it generated.

I definitely feel that the competition would have received more entries if the requirement had read:

“Guess how many posts the forum will have at the end of the 20th”

To get an even better response that I’m sure would have generated more entries, it could have just been:

“Guess a number”

With so many competitions being offered, the competition that requires the least amount of effort will be the one with the most entrants.

Make sure you still get a return

Although the above suggestions should see your competition entries rise, there is the problem that simply having a lot of entries does not necessarily constitute a successful competition. What is needed is traffic and promotion and that requires more work on behalf of the entrant.

To get a great return, you need the entrants to do something on their own site that remains quite simple to do.

While I have previously asked entrants in competitions on Cash Quests to write reviews of the site, with the amount of competing contests at the moment, I would drop the requirement to just “link to me“.

It’s simple and easy but it still has the potential to give you a nice return on your contest.

A case study

To provide an example of some good aspects and points for improvement in a competition, I thought I would take a look at the Lucky 7s Contest being run by Betshopboy on i thought therefore i blog.

The competition was created to celebrate the 7th of July 2007 (7.7.07) and with just 9 comments left on the post and the closing date rapidly approaching, it is a competition that you have a good chance of actually winning!

Let’s take a look at it:

                    The prize is great: Top prize is US$77 and 6 other people will win US$7 each. I think that’s a good prize amount as it still makes entering the competition worthwhile without having too much of a loss for the host if the competition is not well received.

                    Entry requirements are too hard: To enter you need to post a 2oo word review of the site with specific anchor text and link to the competition page plus another page of your choice. Furthermore, you must subscribe to the RSS feed and take a screenshot of the site in your reader which needs to be included in the post. Then leave a comment AND email Betshopboy with the link to the post.

Ouch! That’s a lot of work to be done and could easily take some bloggers around 30mins to complete the task - if they know how to do it at all!

Considering that I could win a PS3, Wii or XBox over at JohnCow just for copying a small piece of text on to my site, I would be more inclined to enter John Cow’s competition than this one. The smaller the prize, the smaller the requirements have to be and I would drop the requirements on BetShopBoy’s competition to just “write a post about my site“. Nice and easy.

On the other hand, difficult entry requirements represent a great opportunity for the entrants as the number of entries is low. If you’re prepared to go to the effort for Bethopboy’s competition, you’ve got a very good chance of winning the cash!

                    Branding is beautiful: Betshopboy has a logo and banner made for the competition which helps to make the competition look serious and professional. To be honest, I’m quite surprised that more contest holders don’t do this as you could easily make the competition requirements to simply place the contest banner in a post. Be sure to put your URL in the banner and you’ve got a nice bit of free advertising.

Overall, it becomes a case of matching your prize to your entry requirements and goals for the competition.

There’s a lot of competition between competitions

As more and more bloggers are holding competitions, you need to make sure that the competition creates not only a great return for yourself, but for the entrants too. Offer a great prize with easy entry and you’ll always come out the winner!

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