Incentives – Pulling in a readership, Part Two – Competitions

This article follows on to my general introduction to Incentives which you can read here

If you offer a competition it is important to structure it in such a way that it minimises the hassle of running it, and maximise the positive effects to your blog. The following are some of the common tips given by many websites (for a more in-depth guide to competitions see Problogger)

Sane (KISS). As I have alluded to before in many blogs on designing content for the net, the average surfer is a person of very short attention span. This is no insult to you, constant reader, it is because of the information overload on the web, the Human Brain makes sub conscious judgments millions of times a second, and the gestalt effect of ideas, images and sounds all determine in a short space of time whether or not our brain deems something important enough to read. This has always happened but the coming of age of the information superhighway has multiplied this effect tenfold.

Therefore anything which at face value appears too complex or time consuming to be worth the effort will be edited by the brain, and clicked away by the finger. Simplicity of design is a beautiful thing, think about the old business maxim of ‘build a better mousetrap.’ Simple questions followed by a A) B) C) answer style is fine, and about all that needs to be done, remember you are not challenging the intellect of your reader in the competition, if they want a challenge then they will apply to Mastermind (I don’t know if the Americans have an equivalent of this program, answers on a postcard…) Remember to KISS.

Maximise the Potential

If you are running a competition, it is important to remember that you expect to gain some benefit from doing so. The use of a competition as marketing tool is not a new thing. It has been happening for many years. With a ‘hard’ product, an item or similar that is physically purchased, the incentive is simple, ‘buy me, and you will get the chance to win this.’ With promoting your blog or website, the incentive is to read me, or subscribe or click these links. Effectively it is the same ploy and there are a number of ways with which you can maximize the effectiveness of this. Make your competition open to new RSS subscribers, or for those who leave a comment or URL link on your site. If you are after content, make the competition a writing competition or similar. A highly cunning, but bordering on transgression of the above KISS rule from ProBlogger is to hide clues in archived posts and holding a treasure hunt (increasing page views at a stroke)

However you do it, and whatever method you arrive at for your competition, think about the inputs and outputs carefully.

Related posts

1. Incentives – Pulling in a readership – Introduction
2. Incentives - Pulling in a readership, Part Three - Intellectual Incentives
3. Best of Blueverse Feb 08
4. Success through Planning - A Guide to Effective Web Business Plans - Introduction
5. Strategic Content Development – Change management, the Do nothing Analysis