7 Must-Follow Tips of Organizing Successful Blog Contest
You must have encountered or probably joined a lot of blog contests and giveaways. But why people love to launch blog contests?
For a newly set-up blog, the reason for organizing blog contest is probably because of the want increase the exposure and interactions that are happening around the blog. And that’s why I launched my iPad 2 giveaway over my site – Kissing Crust.
While for an established blog like Famousbloggers.net, the reason may towards strengthening the branding of the blog.
Let’s take the contest that Hesham has just announced the winners. I am pretty sure the objectives behind the contest is strengthen the content base of Famousbloggers.net especially in relation to internet marketing contents. With this contest, it will help to push this site to be source of great internet marketing contents and therefore, will boost this site traffic and user engagements.
And in case your new year resolution is to have a way better blog in 2012, organizing contest can be one of the ways. Unfortunately, the result that you want to see after organizing your contest may not meet your expectation or even worse, cost you more than you can earn.
These 7 must-follow tips will ensure the success of your blog contest. Are you ready to organize successful blog contest this year?
1- Set Up Your Objectives
The first thing you must do before launching your blog contest is to set what you want to achieve from the contest. The most important element for this pointer is to keep the objectives as simple as possible.
Don’t create contest to achieve everything that you can think of. If you want the contest to create interactions within you blog through blog commenting, create the contest that will encourage people to leave comment and that’s the only way they will win the contest – not through who tweet most, who share most in Facebook or must create contest reviews.
My advise: Have only one objective for one blog contest. It will make it easy for your contest to be understood and joined. This will help you too in managing and monitoring the success of your contest.
Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t. (Peter Drucker)
2- Use Contest/Giveaway Tools
Give yourselves a break. Use contest/giveaway tools like CompResult and RaffleCopter to manage your blog contest. You may not find it handy at first but trust me; when your blog contest gone viralled and thousands of people joining your contest, this kind of tool will definitely save the day.
I have always use RaffleCopter to organize the contests over my site. The reasons why I love it are you can moderate the entries, it will help you choose the winners and most importantly, it keeps the record of who join your contest.
This can be handy when you want to launch another contest in future. With simple emails, these are the people who will help to push your contest to go viral and be a success.
My advise: Save your time and effort if you can. If you not planning to use any tool, make a simple contest and avoid using point-based system to select the winner. Use Random.org if you can.
3- Get A Prize Everybody Want
You do not need to offer lots of prizes. What you need is to offer a prize that will make everybody gone crazy. For me, offering a brand new iPad 2 is definitely better than a contest with prizes that worth more than $1000.
People do everything for iPad 2. If you offer such prize, people will do everything for your blog to win.
So, instead of wasting $1000 for prizes that you still not sure whether will it get people excited, why don’t you simply get an iPad 2 worth only $499 for the winner which will definitely create a lot of buzz over Twitter?
My advise: Less is definitely more. By offering limited prizes, it will create a better sense of competition to get the top prizes which will leads to more participations and site visits.
4- Keep Close Relationship With Blog Sponsors
The iPad contest that I’m having over my site is also being sponsored with various WordPress theme developers like ColorLabs & Company and ProThemeDesign. By keeping close relationship with them, whenever I plan to organize blog contest in future, the chance of them supporting me is pretty high.
Plus, if you are lucky, the sponsors who are highly influential will also help you to promote your contest to their followers.
My advise: Sometimes, it only requires simple email and honesty to get others’ help.
5- Be Firm To The Winners
Before you launched your blog contest, be firm on how will you announce the winners and give the prizes. My suggestion is to announce the winners through announcement page and the winners should response to you within certain period of times to claim the prizes they have won. If they miss it, the prizes will be given to others.
By doing this, it helps you to save your time and to ensure you can settle everything as soon as possible.
My advise: Even though you have set some terms & conditions, it doesn’t hurt to bend the rules once in a while. After all, the winners have helped to promote your blog 😉
6- Complement The Blog Contest
After a while, you may able to see the direction where the blog contest is going. Sometimes, the buzz that it receives may not as huge as you hope for.
If you are confident the buzz can grow further if it gets more exposure, take necessary action to bring more attention to your blog contest. You can use Twitter, Facebook and ways that can bring new audience to your blog contest.
For me, besides Twitter, this blog contest is also my way to tap to new audience to my iPad 2 giveaway that will end in January 2012 ;). Don’t forget join it ok? Be quick. It is going to end soon.
My advise: Keep monitoring your blog contest. Always have this question with you: What I want with this contest, have I achieved and if not, will I achieve when the contest ends?
7- Element Of Surprise
After your blog contest has ended, I can assure your site will change in a good way even though the impact can be differ; either minimal or significant.
So, why not you give some surprises the participants as a sign of appreciation?
For example, there are probably few who actively promote your blog contest but do not won any prize. So, give token of appreciations to them. They will definitely love you more!
My advise: Besides use your own fund, you can get help from the sponsor. I am sure some of the sponsors have no issue to give something extra to those who have indirectly promote their products.
Conclusion
Well, how do you find about the 7 tips of creating your next successful blog contest? Do you think it will create a successful blog contest?
Based on my past experiences, it will. What about you?
Last word of advise: Keep your contest as simple as possible but make the prize as attractive it can be. People will floak your contest and you will smile all day long seeing your blog grows day by day.
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