Contests are a powerful tool because they get your client involved with you. Contests make your clients think about you constantly. It makes them go out of their way to promote your business.
What's the best kind of contests to have? Contests where clients get referrals for you. You should have contests where your clients win prizes depending on how many referrals they get for you. This has a two way effect.
It gets you new clients (the referrals), and it makes the client feel more involved in your business. Another interesting benefit is that once clients start promoting your business, they'll continue promoting it even after the contest has ended. You want to have Contests on a regular basis, so your clients can start developing the habit of promoting you.
What's the best prize to offer for a contest? Recognition. People are starving for recognition. What other prizes can you give besides Recognition? Your products or services. Discount coupons or coupons for something free make great prizes. It also makes your services more valuable. And it doesn't cost you a lot of money.
If you look at what your actual costs are, you can see that it doesn't cost a lot to give your services away. Remember to always calculate your costs before running a promotion.
If you're getting four new orders by giving away one, aren't you ahead of the game? Not only that, but each new referral client will also be bringing you new referral clients. You see how this works? Your client base will start multiplying.
How often should you run a Contest? Just like the newsletters, you should run your Contests as often as possible. As a matter of fact, you should strive to keep a contest continually running. As always, start out slow and build your way up.
Different ways to run a contest on the Web
The key to successfully run a contest is to define your target market. Create something that would be fun and quick to enter. For example, if you publish a newsletter or ezine, you can offer an entry to your contest if the potential participant signs up for your publication. This is another excellent way to gain more subscribers. Put all the names into a box and draw the lucky winner!
Another way is to place a question on your web site. Instruct your visitors to answer this question. If they get it right, they have an entry into your contest. Determine the winner by drawing from all the names who answered your question. If you have more than one question, simply determine the winner that got the most correct answers. If you have a tie breaker, put all the names with the top number of answers into a box and draw a winner.
To help populate your forum, run a contest where a winner is recognized by the number of posts he/she has. If you have a tie breaker, put all the names into a box and draw a winner. This is a great way to get more forum member sign-ups and keeping your forum active.
Once you decide on the prize(s) you'll want to determine whether you will be the donor, or if multiple donors are going to be involved. If there are several prizes, you can have more than one winner. Either way, the prize should be something that's going to be useful and fun to work with.
The most important to remember when setting up a contest is to have the RULES visible and clear. This way there's no confusion and you stay legal. Some examples are:
- Age requirements
- Location
- NO Purchase Necessary (Is Illegal to purchase to enter)
- Privacy Policy
- Start and end
- Entries void where prohibited by law
- Number of entries a person/email/household allowed to enter
Making sure your contest ready to go, the next is promotion. You can now promote your contest on the web just like any web site. However, there are a couple of sites that will list your contest for a link back.
while there are others that will list your contest, always remember to check which web sites allow you to post. Some have restrictions on the days of the week, timelines, and their own rules about running contests. The more participants to your contest, the more web site visitors!
Abe Cherian is the founder and Project Manager for Multiple Stream
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Abe Cherian is the founder and Project Manager for