Before You Run That Blog Contest

Before you run a blog contest, stop and ask yourself why you’re doing it.

There are so many blog contests going on every day.  Just look at giveaway submission sites like my own blog network’s Mom Giveaways and you’ll see hundreds of miscellaneous contests to enter every week.

Its a whole sub-culture. Giveaway devotees spend hours every day running from blog to blog, dropping their name and email in the comment section of every contest they can find.

Blog contests are great for driving traffic to your blog – at least that’s what we used to say.  Is that really still the case in the middle of 2009 when your giveaway competes with hundreds of others every day?

Don’t run a blog contest just because you see ‘everyone else’ doing it.

You have to realize they may have different motives than you do in the first place.

Established blog publishers who earn income from ad networks have found that running contests on a regular basis is a good strategy for generating additional ad views.  They have positioned themselves well enough to attract giveaway items at no cost, so there’s little risk for them – and in some situations the publisher is even receiving payment to run the giveaway.

If you see all of these great contests driving big traffic you might think, ‘Hey, I can do that’.  But you don’t have PR peeps knocking on your door with free goodies so you head out to the store and spend your hard earned cash on a great prize.  Then you spend time photographing and setting up the contest.  You spend a few hours submitting your giveaway to all the sites and then sit back waiting for the magic to start.

But it doesn’t.  So you head out to the social networks to promote your contest.  As the deadline draws near you’re reduced to literally begging for entries.

If you have to expend major time and energy promoting the contest that is supposed to provide you with great ‘free’ exposure – is there a small chance that you may be working at cross purposes?

If you really believe a contest is a good idea, here are a few tips for lining your contest up with your primary goals.

The contest prize should be relevant to your content and of interest to your readers.

I was actually approached recently by a company that wanted me to offer a giveaway for pantyhose.   Like we work at home women even wear them   I’ve seen some pretty crazy items offered on blogs lately and wondered what the blogger is possibly thinking.

Consider using a mailing list subscription as the entry point instead of a blog comment.

Blog comments are a visible confirmation that people are entering your contest – which is great when you get hundreds of entires but can end up being embarrasing when you only get a dozen or so.

Let’s face it too:  a blog comment is pretty cheap currency.   It’s fine if you’re doing the contest purely for traffic generation but if you actually hope to leverage the contest for future benefit, you want to have permission to communicate with those who enter.

We recently ran a contest on Sparkplugging where we asked readers to subscribe to the RSS feed and leave a comment to enter.  Naturally, they were on their honor to do so since we can’t verify RSS subscriptions in any way.  I believe it worked, though with an average of 18 entries per blog that participated in the giveaway, it isn’t easy to proove.

When you invite readers to subscribe to your mailing list to enter – you do realize that they may just unsubscribe as soon as the contest is over.  But that’s an acceptable risk to me.  If my contest prize was relevant to them and I’m sending them other relevant useful content, I’ll win over those that are genuinely interested.

Be careful how much you ask for

While you want to get some commitment from your contest participants, you have to be careful about asking for too much of an investment in time and energy.  Some friends of mine are running a contest right now where they’ve asked participants to create a video to enter – and the entries are coming in as slow as molasses.

With so many contests to choose from, many will skip over those that require any real work   (You’ll notice though that I decided to enter!  Heck – I have a fifty percent chance of walking away with that flip camera at this point.)

Measure the results.

Note the time you invest into the contest, all the way from planning, through execution and delivery of the prize.  Note any money spent on prizes and promotion.  Note the social currency you spend as well as you tap your social networks for a response to your contest.

Now evaluate the results.  How much additional traffic did you get?  How many new subscribers?  Did you see any tangible benefits?

The important question now is this:  If you spent the same amount of time and money on some other business activity, would you have better end results?  (Could you have written and promoted a special report?  Could you have planned and held a teleseminar? Could you have created and marketed a product for sale?)

When you track what you give to it against what you get from it, I believe in many cases you’ll find that running a contest wasn’t the best use of your influence and resources.

What do you think?