How To Throw a Viral Contest On Your Blog
One of the best ways to generate extra traffic for your blog and get a major boost in the number of people who visit your blog is throwing viral competitions. Giveaways can always bring more people to your website as everyone likes freebies. Viral competitions are a bit different. Sure. You are giving away something to your visitors, but your goal is to spread the word about your blog and reach people you usually don’t reach with your everyday giveaways.
For your viral giveaway to work, you are going to need a killer gadget. Something that people want to own badly. The iPad comes to mind at this point, though the next generation X-Box or iPhone can all make great prizes as well. You can’t pull it off with a bag of chips or a t-shirt. That’s only one part of the equation. You have got to have a clear plan what you want your visitors to focus on. In most cases, it is always better to allow your visitors to enter your contest multiple times. You should have one main way for your visitors to enter your contest and add other channels that you want to target in your “extra credit” section.
Let’s say you want to spread the word about your blog on Facebook. That needs to be your “must-do” step for your competition. You can make other steps optional. Of course, since taking those steps increases the chances of winning the prize for your visitors, you can expect a lot of them to take those as well.
Don’t Be Cheap
Everybody wants to be a winner. When you have only one prize up for grabs, it may turn some visitors off. The more people your contest, the less chance each person has to win your contest. That’s why it always pays to have multiple prizes up for grabs. Let’s say an iPad as your main prize and a PS3 and a Xbox as your second and third place prizes.
Tracking Is Key
If you are allowing your visitors to enter your contest multiple times, you want to make sure you have a way to track their entries. One way to do this is by giving each visitor a unique URL. The easiest way to do that to somehow add the username of your visitors to the end of their URL. That makes the URL more recognizable to them and to you as well. Another way to do this is by asking your visitors to include their Twitter username with each step.
Focus On Major Sites
Don’t forget to prioritize your steps. If you want your visitors to spread the word about your contest on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious (in that order), make sure they know that. You can give more entry points to those who add your site to Facebook and less to other steps. You get the idea.
Don’t be Passive
Just because you want to focus more on Facebook with your contest does not mean that you should forget about other channels that can get your blog some traffic. There will always be visitors who want your prize so badly that they’d do anything you ask of them. So don’t forget about some of these sites:
Reward User Generated Content
You should not forget about YouTube when setting up your giveaway. You’d be surprised how many people go out of their way and post videos to YouTube if you make that a part of your contest. You can always use these videos to push your blog and spread the word around in the future, so there is no reason not to try it.
Pull It All Together
In order to get the most out of your viral competition, you will need a super prize and a decent strategy. You don’t want to have too many steps and turn your visitors off in the process. Make the step that you absolutely want people to take a must do and keep everything else optional. While you do want your visitors to add your links to as many social networking and bookmarking sites as possible, you don’t want to include every single such site in your giveaway rules. The best way to do this is by creating a unique link for each user and give them one entry per each submission. So no matter what site they submit your site to, they get a point. That’s what I call entry-per-click strategy. Last but not the least, bloggers should ask their visitors to avoid spamming on social networking sites. It just does not look good for anyone. So be aggressive but don’t jump off of a cliff.
You should also take the time to go over your blog statistics and numbers after your contest to find out what your return on investment is. If you have gotten enough traffic, links, or attention for your troubles, there is no reason not to try throwing more giveaways on your blog.
