I am thinking of a big contest in coming days on my forum. Lets say the prize gonna be worth approximately $1000 (one thousand us dollars) or more. Since its a big chunk of money , I wanna maximize the output for the money. My goal is two things: number one is increase the members, and number two posts. How you suggest I should run the contest. And mainly, where you think I should market the contest? From my experience I found marketing the contest is a big factor for any contest to succeed. Thanks for your suggestions.
Have you held other contests there in the past? That's a fairly large prize investment, depending on who's providing the prizes and the success of your other contests. One recommendation for marketing the contest is to reward members for advertising the contest elsewhere. Of course, you wouldn't want them to spam other fourms -- but if they've got a blog, maybe offer them "contest entries" for promoting the contest on their sites.
Something I'm thinking of doing is doing a drawing for a prize. Basically who ever buys my script will be entered into a drawing and who ever is the winner will get a prize. My price range is going to be around $350. Even that I think it's too much. If you really wanted to do $1,000 I would do 4 or 5 events over a year or so.
Yes Marketing a contest is really important and I think these days $1000 worth of prizes is also too small with many bloggers holding contests for like 3000$ and more.....
$1000 is really not much for a contest. I say just keep the money and spend it when you need to spend it. Just work on unique content & features for now. A contest is not a quick fix.
I am currently running one contest which will end soon. Spending $150 for that contest got me few thousand posts, several hundred members. Spending $1000 is little risky I know; but I got inspired by the results from the first one. I wanted to get some advice how I could maximize the benefits. Do you think marketing on other popular webmaster blogs gonna do any good?
build your forum first, then hold the competition. Few people will trust your competition if there is virtually nothing there. Get a few posts, take $500 of that budget and get people from DP to post quality posts. Make your community look active then use the $500 to buy an IPod or IPhone and the rest of the money can go into shipping it to them, with the rest being used as cash rewards for runner ups. Once you have at least 50+ forum members, and at least 500 posts (not topics but posts) then hold the competition. The contest will serve as a catalyst for people to join your forum.
I had a contest where members of the forum reffered members. Every member=1 time their name is put in a drawing. It worked "Okay"
Well I must say the post rate gonna go down a lot once the contest ends. But I am hoping it would be much more then when I start the contest. It is sort of a gamble; worked for many and many failed.
Not sure what the goal is but certainly math is a factor. About how many post etc does it take before you generate $1,000 earnings on your site. It might be that for $1000 you could hire several posters to make new posts.
IPOD, IPhone etc or a free one year premier RS account will be more effective then cash.OR, you can say that ipod etc are cash exchangeable so that they can take anything they want.
Ok, I don't get it. So you are going to repeat something that didn't work, that you didn't get your money back??? You said it has worked for many? Who? No offense, I'm just curious.
It worked for me actually. I have a smaller contest running on the forum currently; worth about $150. That one generated 3000+posts, about 200 new members. Based on the experience I thought its worth making a big one. You may have experience otherwise. If you like to share I would be very interested to know about it