As you may know, we do organize blog contests here on FamousBloggers.net from time to time, it’s our way to connect business owners, developers and bloggers. We try to create a new business opportunity, engagement, exposure, web traffic and much more. All this plus great cash prizes for the winners. It’s a great deal for everyone who gets involved in our contests.
This is great, but managing a blog contest takes a lot of work and time. There are a few real challenges to face when organizing a blog contest that you have to think of.
Seriously, there are huge tasks and things to do! I realized this after launching a few competitions, and decided not to do it anymore unless I find a solution that saves me time and effort. I had to think of changing the way I manage contests and overcome its pain. But nothing that I know could help with that really!
So, I decided to make my own solution!
I’ve tried many times in the last 6 months to find a way out of this, especially because I like to organize contests on the blog, (actually my blog readers motivate me and ask me about new contests all the time!) So, I thought about developing a WordPress plugin that could help and reduce the required tasks. But, it’s something I really can’t do alone as I have tons of things going on all the time.
Finally, I talked with my partner Mohamed of BloggersNetwork.net about the idea, and actually I had to fly to California to meet him and brainstorm the idea!
And Yes!
Mohamed and I started to work together on bringing up a new freaking awesome WordPress plugin to manage blog competitions. With this brand new plugin, most of the pain of organising contests has now been taken care of.
We call our new plugin CompResult!
And, as you can see from it’s name, the ComPesult plugin was created to take care of all the dirty work, painful tasks, and boring stuff that you will have to do to launch a successful blog contest.
You Can Not Compete with Time, but…
There is a fact I believe in, you can not compete with time… But you actually can save some of it!
Take a look at this list of things that you must do to launch a successful blog contest:
- Make a plan
- Find sponsors
- Do a quick blog maintenance
- Put some pages on your blog
- Create some creatives
- Spread the word about your contest
- Reply to tons of emails
- Publish posts
- Calculate results
- Announce winners & deliver prizes
Cool! mmm…
Yeah, the list can be longer, or maybe you can shrink yours a little, but it is still a freaking painful job, and many people won’t believe it till they do it themselves or at least participate in a contest.
If you are planning to organize a contest or a competition on your blog, then you really have to think twice about how you will manage your time. Time is your main challenge, so you will need to save as much time as you can to do your other daily blogging tasks. I means it doesn’t make any sense that you will spend all your time managing a blog contest and forget about your business.
Yeah, I’ve used Excel spreadsheet, Google docs, main mapping apps, my calculator and even pan & papers!
But, honestly, it didn’t work!
Good News are Always Welcome!
The CompResult plugin manages your blog contest, however you still need a plan 🙂
We are getting ready to release the new plugin, after testing it for the first time here on the blog. Check out the blog contests page to see it in action.
Here are some screen shots of the plugin admin page and post editor custom meta box that has been added, plus the results page that can be displayed using a simple short-code, and also the awesome widget that is customizable to allow you to display entries from the contest on your blog sidebar.
Create and manage unlimited contests:
Customize each contest blog the way you like:
You can enable/disable results in table columns for each contest:
CompResult Plugin is Almost Here!
There is a plan to give the new plugin a shot as soon as we have a beta release that is ready for testing. I must tell you that it will be released as a premium plugin with great support, not only for the plugin itself, but other things like helping you organize your contest by giving you great advice, and maybe send a few bloody awesome sponsors your way!
So, if you are interested in testing this plugin and/or planning to organize a blog contest any time soon, visit the plugin website and leave your contact. We can then notify you when it’s ready and pick a few bloggers for the test!
If you would like to be notified when we launch CompResult, just visit the site and leave your email address.
If you have any question, post them in the comments and I will reply to you!