How would you organize a huge-ass contest? $15k cash prize etc.

charlie.simm

charlie.simm

Gigantic Websites Dot Com
Jul 6, 2007
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I'm getting ready to launch AffiliateMarketers.com and want to generate some buzz by organizing a huge online contest. I'll be offering a $15k cash prize and will, of course, try to attract sponsors as well. Since the prize I'm putting on the table is pretty substantial, I doubt the other sponsors will offer used fleshlights or <insert shitty prize here>. All in all, I'm pretty sure there will be at least $15k - $20k in additional prizes aside from my $15k cash prize.

Alright, so the prizes will be very attractive but I obviously want to maximize results. How would you organize the contest?

First of all, here are a few details about the site: as some of you know, I'm a domainer and most domain investors visit Domaining.com at least once a day. I also visit the AM industry's main aggregator (AffBuzz) every now and then but never understood why they chose the AllTop approach (in other words a section for each blog which contains the most recent posts published by the blogger in question) instead of displaying content like Domaining.com does (you have a database of blogs and as soon as there's a post on one of those blogs, it's displayed on the site).

I ended up buying the domain AffiliateMarketers.com from someone, then one thing led to another and bam, I decided to launch an aggregator that displays content the way I think content should be displayed. A site you visit each day to read the most recent AM blogosphere headlines. You can find out which blogs we added to our database by visiting the "Recommended Blogs" section. So as you can see, we have pretty much all of the decent AM blogs in our database (feel free to recommend other blogs though, shoot me an email at admin@affiliatemarketers.com) and whenever there's a new post on one of those blogs, we display it on AffiliateMarketers.com.

Oh and there are two more columns: one through which one hot offer from 6 networks is being recommended (A4D, Neverblue, Above All Offers, Convert2Media, MaxBounty and Affiliate.com: my programmer created an interface through which each network can replace the current recommended offer with a new one) and one through which the most recent tweets from pretty much all important networks are being displayed.

That's it, AffiliateMarketers.com is basically a site I hope most affiliate marketers will visit each day.

Back to my question: how would you organize the contest?

Since we're talking about some pretty decent prizes, I'm thinking about going with an "earn points" approach. So if you're a blogger and post about the contest, 10 points. If you subscribe to our mailing list, 5 points. Then, subscribers will receive weekly emails with the "question of the week" and each correct answer = 3 points.

Etc.

Do you have any other ideas?

Have you ever organized a similar contest and if so, what's the most important lesson you learned?

My #1 goal is simple: I want as many people as possible to become loyal visitors and the contest will hopefully help me generate critical mass.

Should be an interesting experiment.
 


Cliffs:

I'll be offering a $15k cash prize and there will probably be $15k - $20k or more in prizes from various sponsors. My goal: I want as many people as possible to become loyal visitors. In your opinion, how should I organize the contest in order to maximize results?
 
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i read that shit.

let me ask you something, what kind of affiliate marketer doesn't know how to push MONSTER traffic for $15k?

not trying to be rude or anything, but a contest seems like the worst way to get viral IM traffic to your site. you can see plenty of sites that failed doing that.

i *strongly* suggest jving like they do in cb (hell, if you really are desperate just buy solo ads), growing out the email list and moving the site in that direction. way more profitable and puts you in a good position to jv with other potential big imers.
 
I'm not jelly. that's one hell of a domain name, gj. and i bookmarked your site. i think you should seek viral traffic elsewhere - that's just my fukin opinion.
 
Here's how you do it: start a thread asking people how to give away $15k
 
I'd have the women back up to a wall and mash their ass against it. Then I would use a magic marker to draw an outline around their ass to compare to the other outlines.

Edit: Only read the title, not the post.
 
No_Class said:
I'm not jelly. that's one hell of a domain name, gj. and i bookmarked your site. i think you should seek viral traffic elsewhere - that's just my fukin opinion.
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Yeah, I'll analyze other options as well.

I don't think there's a viral traffic approach that could generate better results than the contest though, so I'll probably limit myself to "traditional" solutions like sponsoring a WF theme (it's been a while since someone did this) and stuff like that.

-joe- said:
Bit lame posting your competing site on someone else's forum and holding a competition there to get members, assuming you didn't ask Jon first. Just my opinion.
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It's an aggregator, not a forum.

AffBuzz is my main competitor, not forums like WF.
 
I'd just set aside a few grand, buy blasts from Pace Latin, and Mark Spitz or whatever that guy's name is from offersvalut, Joe Derpman from abustweb, shitmonkey would probably whore himself out for a few hundred bucks, and blasts/cpm's on other forums, viral's more for when Frank Kern wants to have a sweepstakes for a junk Volkswagen to generate optins.
 
charlie.simm said:
Yeah, I'll analyze other options as well.

I don't think there's a viral traffic approach that could generate better results than the contest though, so I'll probably limit myself to "traditional" solutions like sponsoring a WF theme (it's been a while since someone did this) and stuff like that.



It's an aggregator, not a forum.

AffBuzz is my main competitor, not forums like WF.
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So this is essentially going to be an affbuzz clone with some offers on the side, no future plans to expand beyond that?
crackp0t said:
Just ignore Joe. English isn't his primary language (he's from the UK) so he probably didn't fully understand your post.
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Must..resist..urge..to..troll..
 
My honest opinion is that you may be a little late to the game with that idea. Not that it's not a good idea, I just think the industry is moving away from the people that would make up a large part of your target demo.

If you're committed to the idea though I would say you might be better spending the money having some useful tools developed and try to get people signed up on a membership basis. Just having an aggregator isn't going to bring many people in my opinion, but if you're offering them a "magic bullet", well that's a different story. That shit sells itself.
 
-joe- said:
So this is essentially going to be an affbuzz clone with some offers on the side, no future plans to expand beyond that?
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It's not an AffBuzz clone, it's a Domaining.com clone, basically two completely different approaches. I decided to launch AffiliateMarketers.com because in my opinion, Domaining.com displays content a lot better than AffBuzz (yeah, I know, different niches but I'm talking about functionality) and makes it a lot easier to read the most recent posts.

No plans to expand beyond that, it is what it is.

Visit both websites and bookmark the one you like.

If you like the AllTop approach, bookmark AffBuzz or if you like the Domaining.com approach, bookmark AffiliateMarketers.com. There's no "one site fits all" solution that pleases everyone, AffiliateMarketers.com simply gives people who don't like the AllTop way of displaying content an alternative.
 
crackp0t said:
Just ignore Joe. English isn't his primary language (he's from the UK) so he probably didn't fully understand your post.
Click to expand...

charlie.simm said:
It's not an AffBuzz clone, it's a Domaining.com clone, basically two completely different approaches. I decided to launch AffiliateMarketers.com because in my opinion, Domaining.com displays content a lot better than AffBuzz (yeah, I know, different niches but I'm talking about functionality) and makes it a lot easier to read the most recent posts.

No plans to expand beyond that, it is what it is.

Visit both websites and bookmark the one you like.

If you like the AllTop approach, bookmark AffBuzz or if you like the Domaining.com approach, bookmark AffiliateMarketers.com. There's no "one site fits all" solution that pleases everyone, AffiliateMarketers.com simply gives people who don't like the AllTop way of displaying content an alternative.
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Fair enough :)
 
What I like about affbuzz is they have the popular shit on the top and if I was interested in looking for anything new I could just scroll down and see the most recent posts by anyone on the front page.

Your site feels cluttered to me and I didn't even want to stick around for more than 10 seconds. I had no idea what the hell all that crap on the home page was for and I didn't feel like reading anything on there to find out. Maybe its because im hungover and feeling kinda shitty but your color scheme started to give me a headache.

But anyway id suggest having some kind of top posts like aff buzz does so I don't have to go looking through pages of blog posts to find out whats hot.
 
Just my 2c the network section is far too long for each network, there is only one visible above the fold where there are multiple blog post snippets and tweets. That and the two banners take up a lot of space. The private beta logo (whats private about it?) takes up far too much space.
 
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