Contests - What are They Good For?

Gyutae Park at Winning the Web has been running the Craziest Internet Marketing Contest You’ve Ever Seen for quite some time now. It’s been quite successful at generating buzz as it’s been blogged about extensively and even got multiple mentions in blogs like John Chow and Shoemoney. It even got me to sign up for the feed - I’d heard about the blog before but never read it.

Unfortunately so far the only content I’ve gotten from Winning the Web has been related to the contest. Which leads me to my criticism of contests as a promotional strategy. Contest draw people who like to enter contests. Many will do whatever it takes to win even if they have no interest in the content your trying to promote. Contests can drive traffic but since that traffic is often un-targeted it might not be very valuable traffic.

Now I think part of it has to do with where the contest is promoted. Certainly for Winning the Web all the readers of John Chow and Shoemoney would be targeted visitors. I did a contest once with my “big successful site” and promoted it a bit through contest forums and that traffic was darn near worthless.

Since winning the web’s contest is ending soon we’ll hopefully start to get some of the content we signed up for. I’m sure that the site has gotten subscribers and visitors who are only interested in the contest and will drop off but it’s certainly raised the profile of this new blog and it’ll be interesting to hear the results when it’s all settled down.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that the Hummer H2 prize that was announced today is an April Fool’s joke.