‘How do I run a successful competition on my blog?’
Competitions on blogs have become increasingly common in 2007 with an increased number of high profile blogs running them. As a result many smaller to medium sized blogs are considering them also.
The problem is that a competition can actually hurt your blog if you don’t do it right. There are some serious benefits and costs of running a competition on your blog and in this post I’ll take a look at the upsides and downsides.
With the benefits and costs of running a competition in mind tomorrow I’ll publish a post that gives some practical tips on how to run a successful competition on your blog (subscribe here to ensure you get that update).
The Benefits of Blog Competitions:
The benefits of running a competition on your blog will vary depending upon the type of competition that you choose to run. However there are a number of reasons that I see bloggers running them.
1. Finding New Readers – the most common reason that I hear from bloggers running a competition on their blog is that they want to find new readers. The hope is that the lure of prizes will draw readers in and that those new readers will like what they see and stick around. While this post isn’t the place to fully discuss it – this objective is actually harder than it might seem. Simply announcing a great prize to giveaway is not enough to draw in new readers – but more of that in tomorrow’s post in this series.
2. Rewarding Loyal Readers – most blogs have readers that have been a part of a blog from the early days. I know that here at ProBlogger there are a number of long term readers that have almost religiously read every post I’ve written (a fairly impressive task since there are now 4000 posts in the archives here). It’s easy to take these readers for granted – and a competition can be a way of giving a little something back and giving the readers you already have a little incentive to keep coming back for more.
3. Increase Reader Participation – with the rise of RSS feeds as a means of following a blog it’s not uncommon for a blog to be ‘read’ mainly by people who rarely actually visit the blog (ie people who read it in News Aggregators). While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (at least people are reading you) RSS subscribers can be a more passive audience than those who actually visit your blog as they are less likely to comment, participate in polls etc. A competition can be a good way of drawing readers into your blog to take some sort of action.
4. Increase Page Views – depending upon the type of competition that you run, it can be an avenue to increase the pages viewed by readers. Asking readers to comment to enter or sending readers on a treasure hunt through your archives to find a hidden ‘key’ are two examples of this.
5. Good ‘Buzz’ – in addition to the above benefits – there are a number of others that are difficult to put a name to – so I’ll call it ‘buzz’. I’ve found that on my most successful competitions that there’s been an increase in the general positive ‘vibe’ on a blog as readers become energized and momentum is created. This can potentially happen both on the blog (among your blog’s readership) but also off your blog (on other blogs). This buzz impacts your brand, community and can even impact your own energy levels and motivation levels.
The Costs of Blog Competitions:
While there are numerous potential benefits of running a competition on your blog – there are also a number of significant pitfalls and risks that a blogger wanting to run a competition must take into consideration:
1. ‘Costs’ outweighing the ‘Benefits’ – let me share a scenario that I have heard from a number of bloggers in the last few weeks. The blogger decides to run a competition. They put up a reasonably expensive prize out of their own pocket believing it will attract new readers to their blog, they announce the competition, just a handful of regular readers enter the competition, the blogger sees no new readers but has to shell out for an expensive prize. This scenario plays out time and time again on blogs. I’ve seen it force bloggers to ‘go out of business’ and have seen bloggers attempt to cheat their way out of the situation and give prizes to made up readers. Sometimes the investment a blogger puts into a competition can far outweigh the return on that investment. Competitions can be risky.
2. Time Management – another ‘cost’ that many bloggers fail to take into consideration before a competition is that it can be a very time consuming exercise. This is increasingly so the bigger your blog gets and the more participants you have – but even on a small blog a competition can suck up every spare second that you have. Administering sponsors, writing announcement posts, answering reader questions, moderating entries, picking winners…. all of this takes time.
3. Sponsors Problems – almost every time that I’ve run a competition I’ve raised the prizes by asking sponsors to provide them. This is good in that it means I don’t need to outlay a prize myself – however it doesn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes you’re not able to give sponsors the attention that they want, other times their expectations don’t match yours, sometimes they just disappear and winners don’t get prizes, some need more hand holding than others…. While the majority of my sponsors have been great over the years – a handful have caused problems that took both time and money to fix.
4. Distractions from Your Core Business – when you run a competition on your blog it is good to keep in mind that the competition itself is not what your blog is about. A key element of a successful blog is that it produces regular quality content on it’s topic – this is your core business and a competition has the potential to take your attention away from it by taking your time away from writing content and by the competition being mentioned too regularly in posts over too long a period. Getting the balance right between running a successful competition and running a successful blog can be tricky.
5. Reader Disillusionment – one of the costs of being distracted by a competition is that a certain percentage of your readership can become disillusioned with your blog. There are ways to combat this – but even when you manage to do everything you can, there will be some readers who won’t like competitions. The other disillusionment with readers can be among those who don’t win anything. I don’t find that this is a major factor – but you will find that some readers can become quite obsessed and demanding around competitions – particularly if you have problems with administering it in some way.
6. Bad ‘Buzz’ – in my section on the benefits of competitions on blogs I mentioned that you can get ‘good buzz’ from a competition. Similarly you can end up with bad buzz – both on your blog (among readers) and off your blog (on other blogs). A poorly administered blog can end up giving your bad publicity, hurt your reputation and end up losing you regular readers.
So how does one run a competition on their blog that brings more benefits than it costs?
I’ve probably written enough today to give those considering running a competition on their blog something to think about. So tune in tomorrow for a post exploring “HOW” to run a competition on your blog.
In the mean time – feel free to share stories of successful and unsuccessful blog competitions that you’ve run and seen others run. You’re welcome to share a link to your examples so that we can all learn by seeing how you approached it.
Image by Kaptain Kobold
Very interesting issue, I have considered running a competition but I’ve been very hesitant at the possible negative consequences. I’m not sure if the benefits truly out weight the risk.
I’ve started running a contest at my blog. While it will mostly be money out of my pocket, I think it is an excellent way to get attention, especially in the early days. I’m not offering much, about 50 dollars in prizes, but its free, and all you have to do is subscribe to my blog, so I am not asking much.
One blogger that does this well is the guy at blogger noob. Excellent blog and excellent guy.
Justin Dupre
http://www.blogosis.com
Personally as a blog owner I don’t like the idea of a competition because it takes away time from your regular duties and you have to put alot of effort into organizing and running it. Time is money and although you might get a few more readers, the majority of those who participate are people who are already reading your blog.
But….For the participants it is great! I remember a group writing project you did a while ago, my stats went through the roof after my article was listed!
I’ve been considering running a contest on my site for a while now, and this post really does clarify some of the things I had questions about
I agree with Dustin, I’ve wanted to run a competition for some time now but just dont know if its worth it.
I’ve held quite a few competitions and have had GREAT success. In fact, the one I’m currently holding at my food blog ( My Wooden Spoon ) has over 250 entries! AND the traffic has increased BIG time.
About 6mths ago, I had a fill-in-the-blank contest that made it around the blogosphere which brought me tons of traffic and new subscribers.
I think if your content is just plain terrible or boring, a contest will bring you buzz for a bit but you probably won’t gain a loyal readership. If you have some great content going though, it’s a great way to reel them in and keep them there.
Tip: I have a special folder in my email program that all my contest entries filter into. It makes it much easier to stay organized.
Sorry, I meant to add that the increase in traffic has also increased my affiliate sales. There’s ya a reason why it’s worth it right there.
Wow! What a timely post for me! I just started a competition on my blog and I may tweak it a little after reading this post.
All in all I think, if done right, the benefits out weigh the risks!
Darren, I would have to agree that running a competition on your blog would take a lot of planning and consideration to pull it off without a hitch. It would be far to easy to lose readers if the competion was not pulled off in a professional manner. I’m not sure I would run a competition unless I could devote the time and energy to make sure it was done right.
Good post. It would be interesting to read which factors will make a competition to a success. What is an attractive prize on a small site: 25$, 50$ or more? How much shall we pay to get action on our sites?
I’m considering a competition to build links and/or content.
From experience, you have to make the effort to promote your competition. Submit it to one of the many online competition listing sites if you want lots of entries… but the trick is converting those entries into regular readers.
Passopenrecords.org is a blog dedicated to passing open records reform in the PA state legislature. To raise awareness, we decided to run a “PA Open Records Challenge” in which we asked normal PA citizens to try and obtain what should be an open-and-shut open records request. We really didn’t have that many competitors in the blog – mainly, it was handed out in college journalism classes as an assignment – but one of the players around the PA capitol heard about the “competition” and blew up the presses, saying we trivialized the governmental process. As a competition, not too successful – but man, did we get a bunch of press!
Certainly it looks very risky if you don’t have an strong base of users. I prefer to build a critical mass of users first, by generating quality content and then maybe I will think about a competition.
I don’t like it when blogs run competitions, it just doesn’t seam like its for me the visitors. Instead it seams like a visitor attractor.
I’m actually in the process of running a competition right now, and there are some issues just like you’ve mentioned. I’m hoping to get more entries. You can check it out at the site attached to my name here.
I have an interesting idea, but think that it will bring my blog to down because small blogs can draw attention to competition only with big budget in my opinion. :(
I’ve noticed, lately, how often blogs run competitions. Some seem really successful, others seem pointless. At this point, I haven’t a clue how to spin a competition into my favor..
I’m still trying to figure out getting a decent amount of traffic on my site
I’ll be tuning in to this series though. See, its this stuff that makes you the go-to guy Darren :)
Thanks!
Well, I started a book giveaway just the few days ago.
I didn’t have to purchase the books myself. I’m participating in a blog tour and the author sent be autographed hardbacks to giveaway. So at least I’m not going to be in the hole if the giveaway doesn’t work out.
I am concerned that if there aren’t many entries that it will make my site look bad. I’m doing what I can to promote it, but I can’t make people sign up for it.
Guess I’ll just do my best on this one and cross my fingers.
point number 3 sponsor problems is VERY TRUE Darren. In your contest when you blog turned three I agree that I didn’t get much attention as a sponsor, but you apologized for that and so that wasn’t a problem. I will again be sponsoring your contest. But one more problem happened. I won a prize too worth $500 which said it is a custom WP theme design and BOOM the designer was crap. She knew nothing and asked me to supply a pre-made template which she will optimize as per my needs. She even failed to do that. I cannot believe that she asked her customers $500. (IF I remember the price correctly) Now the scene is that I am spending $100 for my new theme design from my own pocket.
I did not email you about it as I love you and your blog and I know it wasn’t your mistake. Next time do something so that winners and givers all are satisfied from your blog.
You asked us to share our stories so I did it :)
I also have a experience of running a contest which failed miserably. And I know the reason too. I had asked people to write about and subscribe to feeds too. Why will someone do both the stuff.
NOW I think the best way is to ask people to subscribe to your email feeds (as John Chow did in his contest against shoe money). This is very easy and mostly people have more than one email address so they will willingly subscribe to email feeds. Asking them to write about the contest or the sorts is like asking them to break there posting schedule ..which is good for a blogger.
By the way good to see a lengthy post series coming up totally written by you. Somehow I keep getting the feeling that number of articles being written by you have decreased..just my feeling..
It happened to me.
A few months back, I entered and won a contest, by sending the most traffic to a fellow blogger. After the contest ended, he shut down his blog, never to post again! I certainly will think twice before participating in another such scheme.
By the way–I am currently sponsoring a contest myself, and all ProBlogger readers are welcome to enter. You might win your choice of prize, including buttons, T-shirts and coffee mugs:
From Chi Kung Skeptic to Iron Shirt Master in 28 Days
P.S. I forgot the most important part of the story. This blogger had promised five winners (including myself) a free blog theme redesign. After the competition ended, he failed to honor this obligation, with no explanation whatsoever.
Great post with some very interesting points. Although giveaways with high valued items may attract more visitors, they may not necessarily attract more readers. I believe that the cost of these high valued prizes are not worth the increased traffic I would receive. More inexpensive prices work just as well, rewarding regular readers and encouraging others to do the same.
Thanks for the helpful info Darren. I’m looking forward to tomorrows post. I’ve ran competitions in my business in the past, and while some have gone ok, others have bombed for one reason or another. So, I could really do with some tips.
There’s a saying that the only bad bad press is NO press and I’ve found that to be the case all too often. Even if a contest brings bad publicity to your site, its publicity and people will check out the site to see whats so bad about it.
Contests are easy to run (require a ping back to a certain post, so many comments for the month, or pick a random commenter) and they can be cheap as well. Prizes don’t have to always be money, they can be reviews, products you received to review or other things that people want. (I’m sure if Darren or John Chow, or even the Cow gave away a potato for posting comments people would be clamoring all over to get the potato!)
While my birthday contest last year was a success, I don’t think I could or would do it again this year. The climate for such competitions has changed and they don’t draw like they used to. But I will add that this observation is aimed particularly at business blogs, because we have an extremely savvy audience that is pretty sensitive to marketing tactics.
That being said, with mom bloggers especially, there were SO MANY prizes I was turning away from sponsors that it just became stupid to do so. That’s why I started Momsational, which has been a huge success. The contests are on a separate blog so that they don’t interfere with regular content, and that blog has built it’s own following of individuals who don’t read the rest of the content on the site.
I can say that running lots of contests with really great prizes does wonders for page views. ;)
I didn’t start a competition on my blog but a fun activity between bloggers called “Blog about your favorite blogger day.” I didn’t advertise it much but I had a positive response and some people liked the idea. It was harmless and innocent. However, some people thought it was ridiculous that I started it and they just classified me as the traffic hogger and started hate site against me for doing that.
What is wrong with writing a blog post about your favorite blogger?
http://www.rebelliousarabgirl.net/?p=1009
Anyways, it is nice to interact with others this way, but there will always be people who will criticize and make you feel awful for starting something they didn’t think of themselves.
Why couldn’t you have written this a few months ago? I also have experienced a problem with my sponsor. My advise would be to always get the product/agreement up front before you post one word about giving something away.
I do plan on having more contests in the future. I keep it fairly simple on my real estate blog, all I want to do is encourage people to subscribe to my RSS email feed. I get a local business to donate about $20-$30 worth of product (dinner for 2, fresh seafood, gift certificate, etc.) and post an article about them in return. Then I wait a month and use a random number generator to select one of my feed readers and give them a prize….at least that’s how it’s supposed to work, when the business you use doesn’t close down. I don’t do any other advertising on my site, but I show a link to the contest above my feedreader with a picture of their business, so they get good exposure. It should serve as a good moral boost, because all my readers are local and when they win the news will spread by word of mouth that the contest as legit, which eliminates a lot of the problems that others may encounter.
I think that the contest pros and cons are only as good as the person putting in the time to run it. You see tons of people that think entrecard sucks, but they aren’t putting in enough networking time to get any benefits. I good contest can do wonders for your site – but only if planned and executed correctly. Your article has clearly shown me that there aren’t good guides on the web to execute a contest for your site – and that’s now on my list of things to do for the week!
My site is running a contest, and it is going pretty well.
Advice Network is going to offer regular people advice on difficult purchasing decisions (like buying a house, planning a wedding, or running a business) written by experts (or at least people who feel like they have something valuable to share. he consumer gets good advice, and the businesses get a good way to promote their services.
We are pre-launch, and we were worried about the chicken and egg problem. We felt that if we launched an Advice Site with no advice on it, that would be pretty sad.
So, we are running an Advice writing contest with a MacBook computer as a prize.
As a tactic, it is working pretty darn well. It provides a hook for promotion, and an incentive to get people to actually write something. When we launch in March, we should have a few hundred articles!
If you want to join the fun we’d love to have you in the Advice Network Writing Contest
How many unique visitors / rss subscribers per day (on avg) would be a good time to start thinking about hosting a competition? 100? 200? 500? 1000? more?
I ask because my own site has been hovering around with 500-600 range (plus 90ish feed subscribers) with the odd fluctuations, sometimes up to a 1000 and others down to 350-400 range. I seem to have hit a cap on my growth and I thought a contest my help with a little spike, but would I be better off going back and pursuing more social media / blog commenting / forum posting and other basic promoting techniques instead?
I run a “TOP COMMENTERS” contest every month where I give away all the review material my affiliates send me..
I have to say that it has worked out better than expected… not only has the comments increased but the site has a more community feel to it..
This month I’ve called it “reader appreciation” month and will be giving things away left and right..
Just started mine and it’s inspired by yours actually! So thank you so much for the “free” idea :)
I invite everyone here to come and participate by the way!
http://xhtml-css.com/blog/twitter-design-contest-a-la-problogger
Again thanks! :)
I am currently running a contest on my site. I have pulled some traffic but my rss subscriptions is low. I think it will help to get me noticed since my blog is so new. I do see how you dont get quality traffic.
Bud
Bonjour! This post came at an excellent time for me. I just began running a very short-lived (expires Wednesday) contest, with the prize being a Lancome leg bronzer (retail $25 or so) that I received as part of a larger package of freebies from the luxury beauty company a month or so ago. As I’m Asian and have no desire for bronzed legs, I thought I’d just give the product away to one of my readers in a random drawing. All they have to do is make a comment on the original announcement post listing their favorite French film (my blog is French-themed). The only requirement I have of the winner is that he or she write an unbiased review of the product as a guest post after they use it.
So far, I’ve only had one comment, though. Of course, it could be that the prize is just too small for anyone to bother, although most of my regular readers generally comment on nearly every post I write.
Hopefully it’s just a fluke. Great and apropos post!
Salut,
Marjorie
Sorry for the second comment, but I should mention that contest laws are pretty strict, and I believe that most bloggers are operating outside of what would be considered legal, at least here in the states.
It broke my heart to do so, but we had to limit our contests to US legal residents only. And we put terms into place that stated if a sponsor backed out, we could substitute or even not award the prize (not that we would do that).
In fact, we had a non-US resident win, and she didn’t disclose that she wasn’t a citizen. I allowed her to keep her prize, and we had to re-award another prize to another US-based winner. Technically, if we didn’t do that, the rest of the entrants could have sued us for not awarding a prize according to our own terms. Not that we thought they would, but you really need to keep your butt covered in these circumstances.
I spent an entire day piecing together a contest legal terms page back when we launched our contest blog, which I invite all of you to review and copy & modify to use for your own blogging needs if you would like:
http://www.emomsathome.com/contests.html
I was a participant in a competition run on a popular real estate social network. It was one that had great intentions, but came up lacking in the execution phase. Rules changed (or were made up) as the contest went along and not enough forethought was given at the outset. What could have been a great contest came up lacking as a result.
This is a great post! I ran my first contest right before the New Year and was surprised at how much extra traffic it brought my blog. I saw an increase in overall readership, a spike in comments (not surprising, given it was a contest based on comments), and grabbed several more subscribers to my monthly newsletter.
I decided that I’m going to hold more contests in 2008. My plan is to make a lot of the upcoming contests exclusive to my newsletter subscribers, as a way of rewarding them for their loyalty.
Yes, I’m a firm believer in the power of contests now.
Thanks!
Competitions are a great way of encouraging reader involvement.
I have a couple blogs on the topics of setting life goals and midlife career change. But I’ve not run contests on either. The traditional blog contest, I believe, would distract from the blogs purpose and image. I am giving thought to some contest that are more related to the blog topics, but haven’t falling in love with any ideas yet.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s installment. BTW, does this comment mean I am entered? : )
I was also involved in Problogger’s birthday giveaway and I was fortunate enough to have a great experience. I gave a $2000 marketing package on this site and then a $500 one on my own blog. Since I launched my blog on the day the contest launched, all growth was new growth.
In my experience, the contest couldn’t be the end of the visitor experience. I emailed each person who entered for the Problogger giveaway to thank them and invite them to the blog, as well as everyone who entered on my site to thank them for their entries. I basically spent two weeks emailing. It’s difficult to say what the return on investment was because I had no metrics to compare it with. Did they come because of the contest or did they come because of the contact? And even if it was the contact that made them visit, I was able to get the names and URLs of 150 people who had already expressed an interest in my service via the contest, and that was gold.
I don’t think everybody should go to these lengths, but I run a marketing blog — I pretty much had to start with a bang.
Do you think a new blog opening a big competition will make some enough buzz to get noted in the blogosphere Darren?
I was always looking for tips and things to attract sponsors and competitors for a contest which am going to open in a new blog, so not sure how would it go. Is it necessary for the blog to be well established to get the contest good going?
Great timing Darren. I’m just going through the process in my own head of how and what in terms of blog competitions. I like the “fun” aspect they offer more than anything else. And the “giving back” to readers. I look forward to reading your next post on the topic.
One question I do have is how to deal with the international issues with prizes. I want my prizes to be available to ALL my readers but physical prizes can end up costing more in postage than the prize itself (well, my level of prizes anyway). I have thought about offering a gift certificate to the online business of the winners choice but this then then can preclude the sponsor provided prize.
Also, how do you go about getting sponsorship prizes, especially if you’re a reasonably small blog? Is it okay to approach business and ask for that kind of thing?
For me the contest only focus on get the high traffics to the website.Repeaters readers and so on.
Contests are good if you have loyal readers with quality content. If your blog is pure garbage it wont make any difference.
I am running a two entrecard contest right and I found this post inciteful so all you people interested in making 200 entrecard hit the my name and go to my blog
I just recently ran a blogging contest about a technical conference I helped to organize. Last year, a similar effort was made, and there were 8 responses. I was hesitant, but part of my job is actually the “buzz” I can generate online, so I figured it certainly couldn’t hurt to try again.
This year (I only have a readership of 136) I had 43 entries. 24 of which were actually new readers.
I consider that a success!
Thanks, very good and valid points!
This is a timely post, I’m having a competition right now. Plus the ones I’ve had in the past have been successful. What I try to do is make it simple so people don’t mind entering and hopefully it will be a positive experience. My current contest is so simple, all people have to do is subscribe to my feed, and then each week I will give one random subscriber either the cool prize or the cash value of the prize. It doesn’t get any better than that. It does take effort though to make sure all the rules are spelled out clearly and that everyone knows they are getting a fair shot.
Thanks for that
good readin there and now I feel like Im ready to run my own competition on my own blog.
Very timely post and great ideas in the comments. We’re a new site and I think one of the key components for our competition will be to match the competition to the current and future readers interests. Pre-sale of the comp will be just as important as the competition itself.