Facibus On Blogging

Where’s the profit in running and entering contests? What is the WIIFM - the What’s In It For Me for people running contests and those entering them?

What’s in it for the people running the contest?
I read John Chow’s blog every day. The information is always worth reading - I don’t let my disappointment at his zero response to my make money online review post get in the way of the overall high quality of his posts. He suggests that running blog contests is a good way of grabbing more readers and making money.

John’s steps to running a successful blog contest are:

• Define the goal
• Tailor the contest to the prize
• Recognising that the best prize to give away cost you nothing
• Working the contest into your overall marketing strategy
• Looking at how you might make money directly with a contest

I can see the sense of this myself - especially when you run a tech review site like John does. The process is fairly simple - get a product donated to review, review it, then give it away in a competition. People leave comments, supply him with more inbound links against specific keywords which helps his Google Rank, add content, you name it. He gets a lot out of the contests and the entrants get a chance to both win something of value and have some esteem needs met. On the face of it, a win-win situation. And win-win works because it is sustainable.

Through last week one of the breakfast TV shows here in Australia ran a contest for some Scanpan cookware - it followed a fairly standard format - a codeword was given and entrants could ring in with the answer or SMS it through with name, address and a contact number. Every morning potential entrants were told that the codeword would be available in the middle of the next advertising break - and every morning, the codeword was given at the end of the ad break. Out of curiosity I counted the ads - ten 30 second spots before the codeword was displayed. Not entirely honest, but a good ad marketing idea, because everyone that wanted to enter the competition would presumably watch all five minutes of ads. This leads me to believe that they were making more money out of the five minutes of guaranteed higher-audience ads than the tens of thousands of 55 cent phone/SMS fees. The win for the TV production house is obvious - and enough people participated to make giving AUD25,000 worth of pots and pans away through the course of the week.

What was in it for the entrants?
I entered the Scanpan contest three times myself through the week because the chance of winning some cookware was greater than the 55 cent entrance fee. I’m looking at cookware options at the moment (I love cooking).

In a wider sense, what is the tradeoff that we’re prepared to offer to enter a competition? What is the cost-benefit equation? Like any transaction, what you’re getting out of it has to be of equal or greater perceived value or you shouldn’t bother. If the Scanpan competition had been about something that I do not use, like day spa treatments or small cars, I would not have been as keen to enter. Maybe you like day spa treatments and small cars, and the point is that this is OK - there will be people marketing to these niches who will be happy to meet your needs.

Some potential WIIFMs for blog contestants are:

• Inbound links: as I said on my guest post on Blogging Tips, the best thing I ever did to improve my technorati rank was to enter a writing contest run by Darren Rowse. Enter regularly and freely where there is a payoff in terms of inbound links.
• Prizes: where the prize is something you want, go for it.
• Community: this is important - if you are working on a group writing project and make some new friends this way, your time is well spent. It is well worth looking at your own motivators for blogging.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that there needs to be something of clear and definable value for both contestant and blog owner, otherwise the contest is not win-win, and no-one will enter.

If everyone gets something out of it, then there will be a payoff for everyone, and more people will want to participate next time. This is the true value of a win-win situation.

Think it through: what makes you enter one contest over another?