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By Amanda Formaro
You have decided to run a contest on your site to draw some fresh users into your part of the web. But what type of contest should you run?
There are several types of contests. The options are numerous depending on your creativity and imagination. Let's take a look at a few of the more common types:
Simple Drawings
The entrant fills in a form that requests their name and email address, that's it. Don't ask for all of their personal information up front, as tempting as it may be. We all want to obtain demographics, but there are other ways to do that. Asking for too much personal information may cause people to leave and not come back. What's worse is no one ever tells you, they just don't return. It's a privacy thing.
Surveys
Here is where you can ask for a visitor's personal statistics and collect your demographic information. Find out their gender, age, marital status, number of children, household income, level of education, and any other vitals that may relate to your site and it's possible advertising market (e.g. for a music store ask what type of music they listen to most, etc).
Question & Answer
Here you ask a simple question that must be answered in order for their entry to qualify (i.e. what is your favorite pizza topping?). Again, here, do not ask for more than the email address and name. Some site owners change their questions daily to deter cheating. There are software programs out there that will enter the contest for you without you ever having to go to the website. Changing the question daily will deter the cheaters, or at least single them out. This type of contest, if kept up to date, can turn into a fun and interactive part of your site. Entrants will return daily to enter the contest, but they will also return for the question! Be sure there is a comment text box within the form to gather all of the great feedback.
Trivia
Here you ask a question that requires more thought than the simple query. You may ask something related to your site. If your site is about a specific breed of dog, you may ask where that breed originated. This may or may not reduce the number of entries you receive compared to a simple drawing. Because the answer is specific to your site may discourage some. You may choose to be more general in your question; perhaps asking who played the roll of Tootsie & Rainman.
Internal Scavenger Hunt
Here you will hide graphics on different pages within your website. Provide clues from one graphic to another. Hunts should not be too hard or people will give up. If you provide good clues people will be able to keep moving through your site and find all the graphics. Be sure to hide them in all of the different categories of your site so that the contestant sees all you have to offer. Provide the option on every graphic to see the official rules and to go to the entry form via hyperlinks. Sometimes people stumble across a graphic while visiting your site and will enter the contest in the middle. Because of this it is important that visitors are able to access the rules so they may begin the hunt. In that same respect be sure there is a link to the entry form in case they started in the middle thus ending in the middle.
You can make things more interesting by placing a letter on each graphic and requiring that the contestant unscramble the letters to form a word.
External Scavenger Hunt
In this type of hunt you provide one graphic that all of your sponsors will hide within their websites. They hide it on one page within their site & provide a clue that is placed on your rules page with a link to the sponsor's home page. This type of contest allows you to get a much larger prize value.
The Family Corner.com requires a minimum prize value of $30 retail to participate. If 20 sites participate at the minimum you have a $600 prize. Most sponsors, in exchange for a higher listing on the contest page, will donate a larger prize. The Family Corner.com scavenger hunts have averaged $1,500 in prizes in the past. You can see an example of this type of hunt at Moms Network Exchange http://www.momsnetwork.com/harvest.shtml
The possibilities for contests are endless. I have conducted message board contests that included a never ending story, an ongoing poem and a chit chat board.
The M Word ( http://www.the-m-word.com/contest.html ) conducts a fun and humorous Top Ten contest where you must come up with the top ten answers for whatever her question is for the month. One month the challenge was to come up with the top ten things you find under your child's bed.
Running a contest can be a great traffic booster, a way to grow your subscriber base and a wonderful way to get your link out via the contest sites. Once you have decided which contest to run, be sure to get out there and promote it by listing it with the contest sites
http://momsnetwork.com/contestlist.shtml. Here's to your success!
Amanda Formaro is the mother of four children. She and her husband live in southeastern Wisconsin. She is the owner of The Family Corner.com website at http://www.thefamilycorner.com
mailto: WebMom@thefamilycorner.com |
