Internet Babel

I gained over 100 subscribers from my last competition and wish I had put more effort in consistently now. Too little, too late. Although I did come in 2nd with a valiant effort with my 5 years free hosting, The University Kid took the gold fair and square.

I’ve still only ever run a few competitions on this blog. Competitions are by far the biggest traffic buzz you can get, if done right. I sort of messed up my last one, picking hosting wasn’t the best idea for prizes to be honest.

Anyway, here’s some crucial steps to planning your competition:

Decide what you want to achieve from the competition
Obviously the most desired result from a competition would surely be a big subscriber increase. But not always. Some people don’t care so much about subscriber increase and the competition is really more of a marketing test and intention to send a buzz through the blogesphere for increased brand awareness. Inevitably though I think the primary goal or, core goal is always to increase readership. And it should be.

Think of a basic marketing scheme for the competition
This is not essential but some people like to be obsessive with everything and write everything down in neat little steps. To be honest, just putting the competition out there, seeing what happens and acting accordingly is the best way in my opinion.

As apposed to having a 100% set plan and budget that you will stick to no matter what. Some may like this method but it’s not for me. People are or can be, unpredictable. Not often, but it happens. You can never really predict the course of anything, you can assume, presume and guess but don’t take anything for granted.

Put your competition out there without spending a penny. See what happens, you never know. Sometimes, for bizarre reasons – certain things naturally spread like wildfire even if you can’t understand why it’s so viral. It’s the nature of the Internet.

I would say, give yourself a max budget, very basic structure and bag of ideas of what you will do to market your competition. But ultimately; observe, think, act.

Set the rules in advance
Make sure you set the rules in advance. Seriously. I made this mistake with the last competition and just sort of put stuff up then made the rules up as I went. This can be fun but potentially dangerous as it could make the competition look a shambles causing it to be a complete flop. Be careful and make sure you at least have a skeleton plan of what will happen and when.

Most competitions online are embarrassingly simple. Entry rules such as: Subscribe. Done. But entry rules like this are super effective, because people like to be lazy when given the opportunity. So the chance to win free stuff by doing nothing more than literally clicking a few buttons… why would people NOT enter.

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That concludes part 1. Throughout this series of posts I’ll be covering prizes, marketing (in detail) and more. Stay tuned