Prizes as Blog Promotion: Contests & Give-aways
Prizes are a time honored gimmick to promote events and businesses, but do they work? The short answer is sometimes. Recently Rachelle Chase did an online promotion by giving away three copies of Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging by Lorelle VanFossen To be eligible for the prize, her readers were asked to add a comment about what they like or dislike to read. She had about thirty people post their comments.
There are three groups of cost and benefit here: blog readers, Rachelle and Lorelle. Let’s look at the blog readers first. Obviously, three of them won a new book. About half of them had links to their blogs with their comments. This gave their blogs additional exposure. Rachelle looked at their blogs and some of her readers looked at their blogs. The cost to the readers was minimal. Basically, the cost was the time involved in writing their comments.
Rachelle’s cost is basically the shipping on the three books. Her benefits? Other bloggers posted about her contest. I heard about the contest on another blog and it directed other readers to her blog. She had about 30 people that posted. The other third of the comments were from Rachelle and Lorelle, and part of their “cost”.
Lorelle’s cost was her three books and, as mentioned above, the time to respond to the readers. Her main benefit is the increased exposure to her book and to her blog. It was at least the 30 readers that commented but we don’t know how many read the post, learned about her book and/or visited her blog.
Rachelle provided additional benefit to all three groups by her topic selection. Her prize was a book for bloggers. So, she picked a topic of interest of bloggers. Her reader-bloggers, Lorelle and herself all gained the benefit of information about blog turn ons and turn offs. Although a couple of comments contradicted each other, definite themes emerged.
Was it worth it? Take a look at the comments on Rachelle’s post and let me know what you think. Did all three parties gain more than they spent?
Great premise and good points. We all win with such projects, but mostly, the readers win because they are involved, they contributed, and those who read this later, will have valuable insights and information to help them with their blogging and what blogging means to them.
I like it best when the end benefit is to the readers, now and in the future. Most people think of the benefit of ROI being in money, but I like the bigger picture.
Thanks!
Thanks Lorelle,
I agree, the focus is often on obtaining a concrete financial reward. In reality, the reward of knowledge for one’s self and others and increased awareness and insight in our readers can be a worthwhile benefit. Just because it is more difficult to quantify, does not reduce it’s value.
[...] others are saying about them. This is true for even the really famous ones out there. Check out my post on giveaways where I pingbacked Lorelle of WordPress [...]
[...] of the first posts on this blog was about using contests for blog promotion and pinged back to a promotion by Rachelle Chase and Lorelle Van Fossen. Because of that pingback, [...]