I have a fashion website with around 20.000 unique visitors a month and growing. As it is a hobby site, I have only 100 USD a month budget and that is mostly spent on hosting and getting to fashion places for unique content. I would like to put some quizzes on my site, offering people a chance to win something. Yet I don’t know where to start. I have seen websites with a fraction of my number of visitors give always prizes ranging from 50 USD all the way to 500 USD. Some do this every month. It is not clear to me how the do this. Does anyone know what the best way is to get prizes to give away to your visitors?
Whoever provides the prizes needs to get a good deal too. So make sure they get maximum exposure all month long. Pitch them in your newsletter, plaster their ads all over your website throughout the promotion/competition. They do it for sales/branding/traffic/whatever and want to make sure they recoup their investment. So prepare a sales pitch (why they should give to your site) and send it to them. It's just a numbers game.
You could read Marketing for (passed the) dummies (phase) - in other words - advance marketing books/articles to get the actual answer. In brief - If you are selling something on your website - then you can ask your supplier to offer you something for damn cheap - and you can give away those goods as prizes. Or your suppliers can sponser the quiz and supplier gives away the prize - you just run the quiz.
With ads there are companies who you can register with and the use your site as part of their network and so upon approval you can start putting ads on your site. I thought there might be somthing like this for prizes. But I chould not find it. So I should contact the companies that might instessting for me and them?
With ads it is free publicity for the Advertisers. When you speak of giving away free - you can run ads that will say - FREE - and when user clicks on it - the user is diverted to the advertiser landing page. I don't think any body would be interested on using your site as platform to give away their product - they can use your site for ads - nothing more. You could still contact companies and convince them to use your site.
In know how they do it: They go to the store and buy it. It's called competition. Spend money to earn money.
Actually I would call that a waste of money, when you can just contact people and get them to donate prizes