As you have read me post a few times before, there is often nothing better than a solid contest to give your forum a boost of growth. A contest can be an excellent source of new members as well as a fantastic way to drum up activity from inactive members. Keep in mind that you never should start a contest without first planning out how you will then promote the contest. At the very least, your contest should be promoted in an email or newsletter to your entire community once or twice, promoted on your homepages and/or other site subpages, posted about in the free advertising areas of other forums that offer that ability. Doing these simple things will only help your contest to be a success.
I recently started a contest on Sprint Users where we were giving away a PPC 6700 phone. This is the nicest phone in the Sprint PCS line up, and is much sought after with a price tag of $599. (Please note that it REALLY helps to offer something people really want.) I don’t like to do ordinary contests and I always try to have some interesting twists involved. The contest I ran on Sprint Users was where the last post wins, and you can read the details of the contest here. The set up made for a very entertaining and exciting contest that took a total of 28 days to find a victor. We had people staying up all night on this one!
Then end result of the contest thread was an amazing 43,747 posts and 273,629 thread views. I am not exaactly sure of the exact benefit regarding new registrations, but I saw a decent 15-20% increase in registrations for the first 7-10 days of the contest. Overall, I am very pleased with the net results and it definitely built more of a fun atmosphere and some additional community spirit.
If you read this and are now wondering what kind of contest would benefit your forum, just think about it for a while. Make sure it is fun and the prize is enticing. You also need to establish it where you will see a direct benefit to the forum’s growth. Here is an older thread from Best Board that covers this same topic. Best wishes!
Link to contest info yields a “you aren’t logged in error message”.
I tried registering to see the contest details, but it says I don’t have permission because I haven’t posted enough. Any chance you can make it publicy available? I don’t want to pollute your forum with low-quality messages just to see that page…
That’s great to hear, it was a great contest that I wish I could of participated in, however; do you plan to upgrade SprintUsers.com to the latest version of Vbulletin any time soon?