So over at The Shiny Swine I helped run a contest to promote the blog. It’s actually the first time I’ve run a contest online and as it was based off of comments it was bit of a hassle to keep track of it all. Now that I’ve done it once though it will be a lot easier to manage in the future. I ended up using a random number generator twice; first to pick the post a comment would be chosen from and second to pick which comment would win the game.
I can see how with a larger commenting base and multiple prizes this could potentially get annoying, fortunately being an initial run we kept it simple. The results? While we did not turn a profit off of the contest our average daily hits on the site increased by 4x during the contest and just around 3x with the contest now being over.
How many of these readers will continue to visit the site over the next few now that the contest had ended is debatable, however I’ll be able to keep track of that over time. A lower monetary prize combined with this being a monthly or even bi-monthly contest could have tremendous results on increasing traffic and keeping steady traffic and is something I will be looking into.
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