Make a topic and tell the people to post there when they get the posts required. First one to post that they did gets it.
hi! i saw a forum site who had this kind of contest...like: the last person to post for that particular day and time is the winner...(cash) i think its really fun!
Yeah, I have seen those too. You can always make one of those never ending "Last person to post here gets $25" threads. You can never lose...
or, whoever makes the 100th post to the topic gets $50 or something. eg. topic title: CONTEST win $50 easy then for the topic you can advertise something.. and at the bottom of the post say, oh yeah about the contest: Make the 100th post to this thread and win $50. this will not only get posters but will also help promote whatever you want get me?
I would lean toward most referrals. That way you are having your current members work for you without them knowing.
@Swerd Good idea, never thought about that! @Snapple Well referrals are complicated to most people and the rewards they get for bringing people in are usually not enough to motivate them to learn how.
The trouble with 'paying' for people to use your services (you are offering a service, after all) is that you will mostly generate prospects who are interested in the reward and not in your services. To use a crazy example for illustrative purposes, you could generate a ton of buzz and a lot of users if you offered a free automobile to the poster with the most posts in March. However, what you would be attracting are people interested in the free car and not attracting your target market which would be people who are interested in your services. In fact, you might actually turn off your target market by getting a lot of posts from people who know nothing about your forum's topics, thereby diluting its value to them. I suggest that you focus on adding value to your forum specifically for your target market. For example, if your forum is about cooking, perhaps you could get a special 'guest' moderator who is a well-known chef for a 24-hour period in which posters could get recommendations, advice, etc., on how to prepare their next big meal. This example may not be the best idea out there, but the point is that such an approach is targeted correctly.
Swerd, cool share of yours. I've never thought of it before. Targeting your market very specifically is king. No success without it really.
Hm... @Swerd, I've got a question here. Speaking from your own experience, is this way of promoting working well? In other words - how does such a promotion affect sales?
If you had a reward for posting on your forum, the posting on your forum IS adding value to the forum. The more posts and topics and users people see, the more likely people are going to sign up for it. So even if the people want to make 100 posts just to get the "free car" those 100 posts of content go toward makeing your forum look better and have more content ready to be viewed by potential members.
I respectfully disagree. If you get 100 new people to simply post on your forum to make the automobile reward, how valuable will these posts be? Will they contain important information on the topic of the forum that will be valuable to the members who are there to learn and share on the topic? Or will they be a few words entered by people who are not knowledgeable or even interested in the topic simply to be eligible for the reward? I am confident that it will be the latter and, in fact, you will be actually diluting the value of the forum by forcing the really interested members to have to read through a bunch of useless postings from the contest-only posters.
Ah, well I mean no disrespect either. Well this really depends on the type of forum. If you have a general topic form, any information is usually nice. If you have a specific nitch forum the useless posts should be deleted by the moderators. With proper moderation no poster posting useless stuff just to get the post count up will be able to reach the goal. Well, as I have said before a moderator should be overviewing all of the topics and not allow any posts that are not on topic. The contest should also state that the posts must not be spam. I find that if you already have strong posting members you may not really need more member so a contest would not be necessary. However this part you are right in. If no moderation occurs and a bunch of spamming posts happen with no Admin or moderator to delete, the content of the forum will go down the drain and eventually crash. Everything is a 'What if' scenario. "What if our forum does not have a set rules on the contest?" Then the contest posters will stick out and spam the forum just to get the prize. "What if our forum has no moderation?" The any spam for the contest will go unseen and the content of the forum will be deluded." However with good management I can see that contests can help the forum, or at least not hurt to try. With bad management and low moderation (possibly due to not being able to pay) problems may occur in the forum. So I am going to end on we both had our points, and both are correct. However its the context of what the contest is and what the forum is that changes the outcome to either yours, or mine.