One of the single best ways to get
people to your site is contest sponsorship. People love games and they
love free things. Why not offer one of your products or services for free
once a week or so? The cost to you is minimal (a prize every so often and
the time it takes to manage the contest), and the return is great. Anyone
who doubts the effectiveness of this technique should go visit Riddler.
They started out as a simple contest and are now quite huge.
A contest will draw two types of people:
those who want a challenge and those who are looking for a freebie. Accordingly,
there are two types of contests: the simple drawing and the skill contest.
If you were to run a simple drawing
you would attract the second type only. What's more, they probably won't
come back for a second time around. A skill contest that offers a prize
to the winner will attract both types of people.
I classify skill contests in two ways:
objective and subjective. An objective contest is based on a straight forward
answer that is indisputable. A trivia contest is a good example. In most
cases you will still have to draw from a pool of correct answers, but this
is OK. A subjective contest is one where you ask for a "best answer". For
instance, "the person who can give us the best slogan for our new product
wins".
It may benefit you to incorporate both
types of skill contest to break up the monotony. Make it fun and interesting
and people will come back for more.
When the participants submit an answer
you probably want to begin compiling some demographic data on them. Rather
than annoy people and put them on an involuntary list and start spamming
them, you should give them the option to receive a weekly newsletter. In
a short period of time, you will have a huge mailing list of people that
are interested in what you have to say. This is far more powerful than
a random list of people that will probably get annoyed if you mail them
anyway.
It is a good idea to have your contest
registered in as many different directories as possible. Remember that
you can bill the contest as a separate site. The more times your site is
listed in the various directories, the better.
There are also some contest specific
directories out there that will bring in large amounts of traffic. Do a
web search for "contest" or "trivia". Find the sites that may list yours
and aggressively seek a listing there. Remember to be polite. Flatter them
a little. It never hurts.
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