Thread: Contest! What Contest?

Originally Posted by DomainMagnate

Will, you gotta do some blogging contest for NB!
You know like offer prizes, get people to blog and join the forums etc.

I'm having trouble designing a good contest for NB.

What do y'all think would be the best contest we could run to excite our current members and to attract new members?

The problems I've run into have been defining contest rules that:

• Do not reward poor behavior. (i.e. posting contests that motivate people to make lots of spammy posts.)
• Have enforceable rules (i.e. member invite contests where 90% of the new "members" aren't real people.)
• Are easy to judge (if I have to manually determine where each of a thousand new posts is "spammy" or each of a thousand new members is "real", I will start drinking and not come back to the forum until Summer.)

Y'all are really smart -- help me come up with something!

We're all webmasters, we gotta do something related to that as everybody can join than!

What about a SEO contest? I remember Sitedeals did it and the thing was just, everybody bought a new site and tried to get as high as possible with an existing word or sentence.
The smarter people will use something which is simple, the real SEO'rs can try something difficult by using a harder keyword to join in.

That contest turned out really well on Sitedeals, many people joined and everyone was pretty happy


This is just an idea from me, ofcourse if everyone would post 1 idea it would be easier to decide which one the best is...


Greetz

Best site review comment or best SEO type site review post.

This way they have to add a quality post to be considered in the contest and give someone a chance to have people go over their site - I think the SEO idea would be best.

The other contest you could run after that is a video contest. The videos could be on youtube, but the content of the video would be to produce a viral video to promote netbuilders.

Originally Posted by Shawn

Best site review comment or best SEO type site review post.

I think this is an excellent proposal as it hits the essence of Netbuilders.

While encouraging quality replies at the same time someone gets quality help which will hopefully further increase hers/his webmaster/seo qualities but also that of other readers. This in turn will increase the overall abilities of NetBuilders.

I've never run any contests like that myself, but have seen it done many times and it works well. I'm just in niches where this wouldn't work - not many bloggers

1. So first of all you need people to post about the forum on their active blogs in order to participate, define some guidelines and ideas what to post about - for example pick top 3 threads and comment on them, or they can just post to link to the contest page and announce their participation.

2. Decide how to choose the winners, for example let people submit their entries and vote for the best one on the forum by members who have at least 10 posts in the forum and their account is at least 2 weeks old (double catch here as people will be forced to join to vote and easy to judge, might be a bit complicated to arrange though - to include all the entries...). Alternatively it could be a seo contest - make people rank for something like "top 3 posts at netbuilders", or "why netbuilders rocks"

Or let people choose one other post in their post and then count all the votes..

3. Prizes!! Well, money is good, but some fun goodies are usually better here, like amazon vouchers, gift cards, free personal tips for your site by master Will, some free links, or even $xxx worth of links on tla.. Usually prizes would be several and will have values of up to few hundred $, or in low $x,xxx
Amazon kindle, seomoz subscription, a bike, free pass to a SEO conference etc..
If you do an SEo ranking contest than also invite sponsors, and/or try to get higher value and more respectable prizes, to get real seo companies to compete for prestize

4. Announce it and let bloggers spread the word..

Contest: design a good contest for Net Builders.

Prize: your contest gets used as a contest.

You win!

I think the world is ready for another SEO contest, but with a twist.

The SEO contest sounds like a good idea and would help me learn SEO better (who knows I ranked pretty darn good for A&E lol).

So... let me see if I understand y'all correctly... (both here and in PM and IM)

What we are looking at is a contest to make a blog post or a page about NetBuilders and rank it in Google for the term "Net Builders".

The contest would run for five months and the prizes will be $1,000/$500/$250.

Does that sound about right? What am I missing?

Yes, and of course, those willing to sponsor can help increase the first prize!