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Running a competition to benefit your site. |
| Interview
with Amanda from Compaholics.co.uk,
An expert in her field with 15 years experience of entering competitions she has
been running a successful competion site for 2 years. Mogga: I'm interested in running a competition on my site, what advice can you offer me? Amanda: One of the easiest ways of running a competition is to buy the prize yourself and create your own competition. Mogga: OK, that sounds like an easy way to go. What do I need to do? Amanda: Firstly you need to come up with a prize. The most popular prizes are cash/vouchers, secondly computer related prizes and thirdly films/videos. You could give a voucher for a site that has programming/html/computer/Internet books or Amazon vouchers are very popular with a lot of sites holding competitions. If you do not actually sell a product that you want to promote then you can choose any prize you want. I run a lot of small competitions and the most popular recently was to win a VHS copy of the new Disney film Dinosaur with over 2000 entries for 1 little film! Mogga: I'm thinking of a book (maybe the html in 24 hrs one... that's a classic amongst learning html) or do you think a voucher is better? Amanda: Your choice of prize is good, you could offer a choice, the book or a voucher, the voucher might appeal more to those who already have html knowledge. But the choice is yours, you know your visitors. Changing the type of prize monthly helped me understand more about my visitors and the type of prize they like. Amanda: Secondly why do you want a competition. Most sites run competitions for gain extra visitors, advertise a product or get signups for a newsletter. A competition is always about gain! What would you like to gain from your competition. Mogga: I suppose the gain I want is increase in subscribers to my newsletter. I've got my own mailing list (recently moved to topica from listbot) that wouldn't be a problem if you were promoting it for me? Amanda: Thirdly how do you do it! If you ask your visitors to sign up for a newsletter for an entry into the competition all you need to do is randomly pick someone off of the newsletter list after your closing date. If you want your visitors to look around your site more then ask questions where the answers can be found by searching the site. If you do it either of these ways then you will gain from the competition. Mogga: That's great! Do you have some examples which I can look at? Amanda: I have only just added a link for someone today, like you they want to gain but cannot afford a lot - http://members.tripod.com/gb3b/w.htm/ This is a good competition to gain a large newsletter list. You could do something along these lines. If you don't mind why not look at a few sites that already hold competitions. If you have a look at www.compaholics.co.uk there are hundreds of different competitions to give you some ideas. Mogga: OK, I'll spend some time looking (and entering) competitions! Amanda: I was approached by www.pc-mouse.co.uk recently, they wanted a competition to promote their new product, but did not know how to do this and did not want all the work involved. If you look at the Compaholics home page you can see what I have done for them. I run the competition and after closing date, I will forward all the email address to them together with the name of the winner and they send out the prize. Hardly any work for them and they get a list of people they can contact in the future. My gain is a exclusive competition that will get more visitors to my site. Mogga: You must work really hard on your site -it got so many competitions. Do you find them all? Amanda: I spend a large amount of my time searching the net for competitions, I am also approached regularly by many companies wanting a link to there competition. The good thing about a web site like Compaholics is for the people that like to enter competitions, they only need to go to my web site and choose the type of prize they are interested in and enter the competition. Easy for them, I have done all the hard work. The advantage to the promoters is that they get free publicity and a lot of visitors sent there way that might not normally visit there type of site. Mogga: I'm convinced! Let me work out exactly what I can offer as a prize and I'll get organised. Amanda: Of course once you have decided what you are going to do, I will add a link to the appropriate prize page and will also include a link in the newsletter I send out regularly. You could also advertise your competition on the uk.rec.competitions newsgroup. Thanks to Amanda for her time and information. And watch out soon for a competition on HTMLCOOK.COM |