I am running two contests on one site. Our Sports talk forum (http://www.autumnthunder.com) has a great bunch of core members, (a dozen or so), and they have posted over 50,000 posts but the problem is I can not get any new people to join and when they do, they never post. The members are all knowledgeable and actually cool to chat with. So I am running a contest that will award the member who get's the most hits via a affiliate program (http://www.autumnthunder.com/affiliates), plus pay them $0.01 per click. The winner gets a NFL Football Jersey of their choice. The other contest is awarding another jersey for the person who is most active on http://pigskin.autumnthunder.com. That is a site similar to Digg but for sports only. The members seem to like it and I was hoping it would be a great feature of the forum site. Should I offer a bigger prize? What other ideas can someone suggest to help get some new blood to the site? Any help and advice is appreciated.
I had a contest once where users could get lotto tickets 1 per hour... that kept them coming back and it went pretty good.
How did it work? Where they reall lottery tickets? Is it legal to give them away as prizes in a contest? How did you pick who got them?
basically I just used sql auto increment to assign the ticket number and used there forum id (they had to be loged in) then just pulled them from a database and even showed them the percentage to win based on how many tickets were out there. It worked REALLY well. I consulted my attourney and he said it was fine as long as I did not make anyone buy anything to participate. I think "sweepstakes and contest" rules vary by state so its best to consult your attourney
also you can use the same "ad revenue sharing forum" thing... as that may also give you a boost... worth a try... what say..