Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Contests are Cool (Win an iPod Touch. Or Cash!)
I have a yenta streak a mile wide. I am, in fact, an unabashed match maker. I love pairing things up, although this may be more symptomatic of OCD than a predictor of success in my backup career running a dating agency for geeks and nerds.
In any case, this week I’ve delivered a match made in heaven. I paired stock image site LuckyOliver up with color palettes site COLOURlovers with a cool, cool contest:
Pick an image off LuckyOliver, create a palette from it at COLOURlovers, and be in with a chance to win cool prizes.
Which, by the way, start with a $300 iPod Touch and end with an iTunes gift card. Bonus: all prizes can be redeemed for cash instead of McProducts so that those of us who think Macs have been rendered useless as doorstops now that they don’t weigh anything can play too.
I am a self-confessed contest whore, but I’m picky with it. All those book cataloging sites with contests where they’re offering up yet another Amazon gift certificate as a prize seem like wasted opportunities to me. Amazon will give you no love and send you no traffic. Why not pair with an online book seller who is keen to share traffic and will promote your contest with equal love and will ship £€$100 worth of books anywhere in the world to the winner?
(Despite the fact that I love craft marketplace Etsy, I was really, really annoyed when I filled out a tedious, poorly formulated marketing survey there only to find out that I couldn’t win the survey contest because I wasn’t in the US. That’s just rude.)
Speaking of crafts, promoting a new book on crafting? Buddy up with a popular yarn house for prizes, and ask people to knit or create (and photograph) book covers as contest entries. Even if you end up paying for the prize pack yarns yourself, you’ll get way more back from your partner’s traffic than you spent in cash. What’s more, that traffic is your target audience, and if you have good content, they’ll come back and stick around.
Plus, “I made this for this contest and photographed it and you can see it here”? Total blog fodder. Everyone who enters will blog about it. Viralpalooza!
So, please: go out and make friends in your niche. Share the love to spread the word. And no more Amazon gift certificates!
04 Mar 2008
| In: Marketing |
I was sorry not to have met you on the night of the Irish Blog Awards. Many congratulations on your success.
04.03.2008, 1:33 pmI agree! I’ve entered a ton of contests on crafty sites, and one gets more than 1,000 comments for her contests. They’re very popular!
05.03.2008, 7:13 amElena, that’s fantastic. If you can point me to any really super excellent contests you’ve seen, I’d so love it because I need to do more research in the area for another client.
i love to use ipod – its very sexy and to win an ipod is my dream
12.03.2008, 5:08 pm