Life, the Universe and the Internet

As I run quite a lot of competitions on my entertainment site I thought I would post my experiences of competitions and they’re benefits to a website in case anyone reading is considering it. Competitions are an integral part of my site now, there is never a time when I do not at least have one running and quite often there could be as many as half a dozen. However I am probably in a good position with this compared to sites for other genres as our prizes are always donated by film and game studios as a way of promotion for them.

Is running a competition worth it?

A competition can bring a lot of traffic to your site but the traffic is not very targeted. A lot of the visitors are veteran competition hunters and they will come, enter and leave. However you can also hook some of these visitors with newsletter subscriptions, advertising etc. A good tip is to have an opt-in box on your competition entry form for your site newsletter. If the entrant ticks the box, have some system to subscribe them.

Also if you have an agreement with a sponsor, and you make it clear on the competition form, you can share the entry data with the sponsor, possibly for a fee. If I ever do this I always make sure it is through an opt in box on screen. For example I would have a tick box that says “Click here, to receive future updates from xxx company”.

How much to give away?

Obviously the bigger the prize, the more visitors you will get but you don’t have to spend a fortune and if you can get someone else to sponsor it in exchange for promotion, all the better. As most of my competitions are for three to five sets of DVD’s I would say the general prize pool is somewhere between the £40 to £100 range.

How can I tell people about my competition?

There is no point running a competition if no one knows about it. If you do a search in google for competition sites you will find lots of sites that list online competitions. Get yourself registered to these sites and add your competitions immediately. Some great UK sites for this are: Loquax and ThePrizeFinder.com, these are both very big competition portals but are UK specific.

What sort of competitions work?

In my experience competitions that ask the entrant to do too much will fail. I have tried to run competitions to get reviews, and to get forum posts and they have never worked. The best use for a competition is in my opinion just for getting your site name out there to as many people as possible. With this in mind, I now never run a competition with any more than a simple entry form, sometimes I add a question but that is it. It is also a good idea to set your competition to allow daily entry as this will bring some people back day after day.

Which brings me on to another subject, make sure all your terms and conditions are clearly stated on the competition page. You do not want anyone to come back at a later date and say that your entry / winning conditions were not clear.

General tips

Here is a list of general tips I have learned from running my competitions.

• Run the competition for around one month
• Make sure each competition has its own dedicated landing page
• If you run multiple competitions, have an overall competition summary page. Entrants will want to know the status of all competitions. Here is my example: http://www.digitallard.com/CompetitionsHome.aspx
• Contact winners via email and ask for their home address. Be quite strict on how long they have to reply otherwise you will be could be waiting around for weeks for them.
• Keep the entry conditions simple but make sure you capture that user data but don�t do anything with it without ensuring you have requested permission.
• Depending on your genre, look for competition sponsors, this makes the whole process considerably cheaper for you.
• Promote it, show the competition on your home page, your newsletter, your feeds and any competition sites you can find.

Good luck and I hope this post will help anyone considering a competition.

I just had a technical interview for a developer contract and I feel the need to post about it because I really couldn’t see the point of the interview. I know that the interview went staggeringly badly, as I did struggle with a lot of the questions. Now that is of course my fault, but I just find myself annoyed at the questions themselves.

Now if I was interested in hiring a contractor, I would be very interested in knowing what real world experience that person has with writing websites. I would want to know about their history, about them personally, about what they want out of the contract etc. I would be very interested in examples of their work that they could demonstrate.

What I wouldn’t do is bombard them with a string of ridiculously low level questions and ask them nothing else at all. Who cares if I can explain from memory every single event that is triggered in order when a datagrid is loaded? What differences does it make? Do you want a developer with a wealth of real word experience in designing a living multi-tiered web application or do you want a walking encyclopaedia on .Net.

The answer in this case was clearly the latter, so I know I won’t get the contract and how I feel right now I’m not overly bothered that I won’t.