Shoemoney has a great, easy promotion going on right now with a contest he’s running. He’s giving away a Flip Mino HD customized with his logo on it.
And all he’s requiring to enter the contest is that you Twitter about it.
Why Shoemoney is going to get tens of thousands of new followers:
1. Contest is dead easy to enter
2. Prizes (Flip and Mac Air) are highly desireable.
How you can do this easily for your blog:
CafePress is offering to print anything that will fit on a Flip Cam. You set up the artwork you’d like in your CafePress account, grab a sample image, post it on your blog with contest rules, and once you pick the winners, simply order the cameras from your account on CafePress and have them mailed directly to the winners!
Easy peasey!
What to base the contest on:
Shoemoney based it on Twitter followers. Read how his is set up here.
But you could also do this with new RSS subscribers (if they subscribe through email). Or how about people who download your latest freebie? You newsletter subscribers? People who freiend or follow you on virtually any social site you’d like to pump new life into?
Tracking and choosing the winners:
However you decide to set up your blog contest, you will need to do it based upon how easy it will be to collect entires and throw them into Excel. You then use Excel’s random feature to pick winners from the list.
Depending on what you choose to do, you might have to enter constestants by hand, or you might be able to download, ideally, a comma separated (csv) file to import into Excel.
The trouble of figuring this out is offset by being able to add tons followers or subscribers and increasing your reach.
Promoting your contest:
If you go with the kind of contest Shoemoney is doing right now, the thing promotes itself. See how he has everyone Twitter “Just entered to win a flip minoHD. Just follow @shoemoney and retweet. http://xr.com/fliphd?”
The thing is spreading on Twitter like wild fire! This is a crucial point in running a successful blog contest. You must think about how to get people talking about it, and the easiest way is make THAT the way they enter the contest.
You could do this with Facebook or any number of other sites. For getting RSS or email subscribers, people would have to still go to Twitter and Tweet a message about your contest to enter.
Make contests a regular thing:
You could run a contest every month or every quarter. The cost of your prizes should always be a fraction of what it would cost to advertise with paid advertising, so figure out what your budget is. Flips cost next to nothing and getting a few hundred to thousands of new followers or subscribers would be well worth the nominal cost of such a prize.
No matter what, make your contest EASY TO ENTER! Requiring videos or blog posts as some part of contest entry is ok sometimes, but you will immediately limit the number of entries you get for the contest. Nothing sucks more than giving something away when only a handful of people participated!
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