Sunday 26 February 2012

Website Competitions

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We all want to have a chance to win something, it brings a light optimistic feeling being part of a competition you might not win…but still have a chance. Should websites do this in order to add to traffic though? Could prize draws help in overall sales conversions? It’s an idea isn’t it depending on the companies’ budget and scale of popularity of course.
Recently Google released a new scheme with Screenwise which allow users to “get paid while browsing the web” (the scheme is now closed). Just by signing up to it you receive a $5 (£3.15) voucher for Amazon and every 3 months you are in the scheme you keep getting $5 Amazon vouchers. The scheme has 11,000 Google + 1’s it doesn’t show Facebook activity but you can assume that it’s pretty healthy as well as Twitter.
What are the best tactics to promote website competitions? First of all the prize has to be interesting, it has to be worth the time and effort for users to enter. We all have different tastes but prizes of products that have a decent mainstream appeal can help. This leads on to my next recommendation which is to create buzz around the competition.
Some of the buzz can depend on the prize and when it’s done for example in summer a competition to win a holiday to Spain or Greece can be appealing. Or if there’s a very popular product like an iPad 2 a competition to win one would be interesting. But to make these competitions stand out you could:
• Create blogs about the contest and sharing it
• Create and distribute a press release stating the information about it
• Try to get sponsors for the product which will add to the promotion of the product and the website in question.
• Making it easier for people to win if they complete simple tasks like sharing the website on their social network profiles, joining a weekly email list, writing about the competition and sharing it e.t.c
The most important way especially for the users is how to enter the competition. Try to make it as easy as possible to enter plus make it attractive. Develop a page on the website from which the home page links to make sure users are able to share the content using social networks.
The benefits of holding a website contest can range from an increase of traffic to increased sales conversions and overall popularity of your website. But it can be time consuming plus it’s about finding the right time to do it. You could do a number of competitions and find that you are not getting enough entries, so in a way it’s all about trial and error and once you get it right let the magic happen.

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