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.

Even though it’s been something I have been meaning to try for some time now, last week was the first time I got around to publishing an article to article directories as a promotion tool. I’ve read time and time again that article submission is a great promotion tool but I just never got around to trying it out. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the concept to anyone reading this, but just in case I’ll try and explain a little. If you’re familiar with the concept then skip a paragraph.

The basic concept is that you write an interesting and original article on a subject of your choice, then you submit that article to a whole set of article directory sites that will hopefully accept and publish it. The promotion part of it comes from the ability to post links to whatever site you want to promote either in the article or your author biography. Examples of some of the bigger article directories include Ezine Articles and Go Articles. There’s also the article directory that I run called Digital Articles.

In order to try and save some time in the whole distribution process I used a third party service called iSnare.com. For just a few dollars per article, they will distribute it to a whole load of directories for you, assuming they approve your article that is. So I created an article based on my experiences of re-directing one website to another, something that I’ve spoke of earlier here and I feel suitably stung by to talk about with some knowledge.

Isnare claim it will take about three days to check and approve your article but with my submission it took about a week. However once it was published, it did seem to start to get distributed very quickly. As I write this, Google is currently showing 227 links to the article and this is in just a few days. The figure is at the moment going up by at least 50 a day. It’s too early to say if this distribution will have any effect on the two sites that I linked to in the article but time will tell.

If you are going to try it I would recommend that you write something unique that isn’t used on any other of your websites. You really don’t want your own websites to be tagged as having duplicate content. Try and make it as informative and interesting as you can and of course pick a subject where you know what your talking about. I found a good method was to take a blog post that I’d written about and expand it into a much more detailed article.

If your interested in seeing how my article is doing now check the google search results below:

Google Search Results…

Whenever I set up a new site, one of the first things I do is set up Google Alerts for the site name, for those not familiar a google alert is an email google can send you when they discover a web page that mentions the subject you’ve specified. I use to find out who’s talking about or linking back to my sites.

So today I set up alerts for this site but the difference here is the site is in my name so I’m basically setting up alerts for my name. Within an hour of setting up the alert I’ve been inundated with alerts for completely off topic pages which are basically people with the same name as me. So far I’ve discovered a barrister, a photographer, an ex man united footballer and someone who worked on the sound editing of some big films including star wars, all of whom have the same name as me.

I’ve refined the alert now as I’m bored of hearing about other Steve Kinsey’s out there, but I guess the point of this post is to say that I’ve really learned a lesson today about being careful when setting up these things to make sure that I really focus on what data I actually want to see as it’s very easy to go totally off topic.