Running blog competitions

Posted on by LittleFears

Running blog competitions

Ya’ll noticed I ran a competition last week right? I mentioned the week before I had the goal in mind of gaining experience running competitions. I still do a fair lick of PR work freelance. In 17 years, I have had a hand in running three competitions. One I ran on Facebook when Like/Share comps were legal. One pairing up with a DVD launch which my colleague signed off without asking me first. Hoo, boy did that backfire. One was with a magazine. I ā€˜m not big of competitions, but I learned something from each.

With this competition, I wanted to see if the rules would be followed, how many entries it would acquire naturally and if it would impact my page views.

Method

I asked participants to share my post anywhere on the internet and post a link to the share in comments on the blog post.

How to enter

Share this post anywhere. Social media, blogs, forums and anywhere else on the net you fancy. Then leave a comment below linking to where you shared the post.

At the closing time, I closed comments on the post. 11:59 pm on Saturday 7th, so nobody could continue to enter the next day.

I added the names of all entrants to a spreadsheet and randomly selected a winner (mistakes happened there, see below). It’s worth saying when people leave comments I copy pasted their exact username into the spreadsheet. That way when I selected a winner I could simply search WordPress comments for their name, and pull up their contact email or social media account they linked to. Once a winner was selected and I had the screenshots for this guide, I deleted the spreadsheet. If you run a competition and collect anything more than names, you need to check the legal implications of any country that may enter. You may need to declare what you are doing with peoples email addresses if you intend to store them or add them to email lists.  By just taking names and searching comments for their contact details, I sidestepped any legal issues. Bare that in mind if you run a give away though. Data is sacred and can come with legalities.

Results

I had a very low entry, 26 people in total.

I did not push the competition. This was an experiment for me and I prefer to see followers and subscribers enter. Low entry is to be expected. However…

I did notice a lot more people shared the post than left comments to enter. I had at least 30 people shared the post on Twitter. With every Twitter share, I get an @ message. Although my icons show none, I also saw a number of Tumblr shares. I have 20 Facebook shares listed on the icons. Some people shared on their blogs as well. I’d estimate, across the board, I had 100 post shares. But only 26 people left a comment with a link. That’s quite a disparity eh?

I currently have about 28,000 WordPress followers and 40,000 social media followers. Each day my blog receives around 2,100 individual hits. Most of my views on LittleFears.co.uk come from WordPress reader, so I get no stats at all from that because most people do not actually open my posts. They are short enough to be read without opening my site. In addition, to all my main social medias (Instagram, Medium, Tumblr and Ello) I share the posts in full. So the 30,000’ish followers I have on those social media’s have no reason to come to my site. My stats will always be terrible. For the first three days, I received an extra 300 individual hits per day. On the fourth day, that dropped to 100 extra hits. Then I was back down to 2,100 hits a day. As a grand total, over the 6 days, I ran the competition, I received 1,000 extra individual hits.

I had an issue with the name selection. I had an over the top way of doing it in a guide I linked to in the original post. It did not work. The snippet of code needed to randomly select a name was easy to write myself.

Have a look at the image below. All the names from comments I added to Column A on a spreadsheet. Beneath the names is a cell with a line of code.

The selected cell with Amanda’s name in has the following line of code.

=INDEX(A1:A26, RANDBETWEEN(1, 26))

I think even as a non-software geek that’s fairly easy to follow. The A1:A26 refers to the cells the line of code is being pointed towards. The RANDBETWEEN(1, 26) is telling the spreadsheet to select a cell numbered 1 to 26. The spreadsheet then gives a random name in the cell you paste it into.

I hope that’s simple enough! If you want more advice with this, please do leave a comment and I shall do my best to help.

Takeaway

As you can tell, I learned quite a bit from running this competition.

The main take away is I need to run future competitions as simplified as possible. The difference in a number of shares I had to the number of entries was quite large. So, simplify. Ask people to take one single action anybody can do. Certainly, do not add two-step processes for running a competition like I did.

In addition, I would run a competition on one platform, so I can monitor it better. WordPress stats on poetry, haiku, short story and comic websites are notoriously unreliable. Consider Twitter or Tumblr. retweet and reshares contests would be better than a blog share contest. When someone retweets or reblogs on Twitter and Tumblr you get a listed notification. ‘Retweet this’ is as easy as I could make it, and may generate a decent outreach.

If you have any questions, please do ask. You all know I try to be as informative and transparent as possible with everything.

29 thoughts on “Running blog competitions”

  2. ” I currently have about 28,000 WordPress followers” – esme passes out

    Get you! Hahahaha, Well done that man. nods and shakes his hand

    The thing I noticed with the competition was that the wording could easily have had people miss that they needed to leave a link to their share location. And that was even after you stated it in bold too. Which is interesting. I almost just left a comment myself minus linkage! Simpler yes, people are short of concentration on the web often and in mid everything else, so simple and strong directions, (numbered) would be better.

    “I think even as a non-software geek that’s fairly easy to follow.” – This is hilarious to me as I literally have no idea what any of that meant at all. Then again I do have (quite seriously) Dyscaculia, so anything like that means little to me. Thank heavens my talents lie in the arts eh?! Hahahaha.

    Esme calling it a fix and wanting a recount (just kidding folks – waves at Amanda) upon the Cloud

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    1. Aha, thank you Esme! I hope that doesn’t mean I sounded like I was bragging? It was intended to demonstrate/educate.

      Numbers could have helped, but if people couldn’t read 3 lines, I really think competitions need to be super focused on one single task. ReTweet for example.

      Sorry about the spread sheet line hah. If you need to use it Esme, I’ll help. šŸ™‚

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      1. No, not bragging at all, just informing us, it’s brilliant. Thanks for offer of help, I’ll bear it in mind, you can be my numbers Fear in times of need!

        Esme laughing and winking upon the Cloud

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  3. I’ve never thought of running a competition from my blogs ..your experience demonstrates that it is not easy!! I once asked for people to share their experience of a particular medical condition. Even though the information I asked for was impersonal and was for a project to assist all the response was pitiful to say the least.

    I think you are correct about keeping it really simple and requiring the minimum of effort by responddrs! Thank you for this detailed post ..very interesting and insightful.

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    1. Funny thing you highlight there. When I’m browsing WordPress blogs I can often think of something to say for most things I read. See when someone asks me to say something, asks me to comment, my brain farts. That’s not WordPress specific either heh. Guess it’s the same with a lot of humans on instructions.

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    1. I’d say share it a lot on social media. As mentioned, I did not mention the contest off-site after the initial post. Had I put it out there, I would have attracted more entrants, but not just my followers you know?

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  6. I think keeping it to one platform may make things easier as you said.
    I find that a lot of time peoppe do not actually read what is being posted. They just like anything a person puts without actually reading it. I know I have a bad habit of doing that when reading longer stuff in the app.
    I am easily distracted.

    Next time keeping it simple will definitely help a ton. For those who have a really bad attention span as well as for those who may not have understood the directions all that well.

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    1. Oh, I’m the worlds worst for that! Hands up, I have to make myself leave 1 comment for every 3 likes I do, or I get into a really bad habit of just liking posts and never commenting. Funny you mention the app as well. Although I avoid falling into a lot of social media traps and addictions, I believe it has encouraged a lazy media consumption in me. Everything on a tablet is easier to click like, share and retweet without ever saying anything. Currently retraining myself on Twitter, in particular, to not just be a like and retweet human bot heh.

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      1. Yea I am trying to get into the habit of commenting more. Even if it is just to say “This is good”. Something to show the writer that I appreciate thier work and the time they spent sharing it with us.

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  7. I shared just did not let you know. I’m in the States so I thought it might be a bit of money to ship to me if I won. I have found Blog competitions like this are hit or miss. Most of mine miss. Keep up the great work. Enjoy your posts each day.

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    1. Cheers man. Yes, the prior contests I have been involved in were very hit or miss and they had a lot of proper promotional work on them. Postage to the US is only about Ā£3, cheap as chips mate. If I run another, please don’t let that put you off. šŸ™‚

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  8. I am sorry that I didnā€™t get a chance to enter and also that I am holding onto a copy of your book and not reviewed it yet ā€¦ once my MA is underway I promise I will. Thank you as ever for the smiles and groans, I really appreciate your work and advice in posts such as these

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  9. I tried a survey of ideas for book titles, (I was completely stuck for ideas). All people had to do was to click once next to the title they liked best. One click, that was all. what happened? Hardly anyone voted, they used their one click to ‘like’ the post!
    That has put me off doing anything like that to get opinions, or to create a competition of any kind. People don’t seem to want to do anything other than what their habit is, in this case, click ‘like’.
    Anyway, thanks for sharing your experiences. It will be useful if ever I try to do anything else along those lines.

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    1. Ah, now you could have also had polite likes from people to nervous to name your book. I had a prior blog to this with about 10,000 subscribers and I asked what I should name what eventually became the Fears. I had a pole 11 people entered. I got more likes and comments. Everyone in comments left polite messages saying what they preferred but had not strong enough feeling to vote. Sure enough, everyone that voted didn’t leave a comment. Go figure. I think we all freeze up a bit when asked to do something. I know for sure I do!

      If you do run a competition and have any questions about mine, feel free to drop me a line!

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  10. Wow, do you ever get an impressive number of visitors! Good for you. I make sure I scare away any newcomers as quickly as possible, so my joint is rarely visited outside of a small circle of strange individuals who keep coming back for more punishment. I ran a “guess the location of the postcard” contest a couple times but that’s the extent of contests I’ve had any involvement with in the blog-swamp. I will say that I tune out whenever I’m asked to “share this post” or “copy and paste” or whatever. I’m not very good at doing what I’m told and I assume there are always sinister motives involving the sale of data.

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    1. My visitor numbers are skewed quite badly. I do try to emphasize how far off my actual numbers are compared to my actual results.

      Competitions are often hard to run on any platform. Magazine, blog, TV or social media.

      I’ll be honest, although I don’t name names, I do try and put as much data as public as I can. I even publish what I earn from KDP, Threadless and Skillshare every so often if it’s relevant for giving a guide for something heh.

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    1. Thank you. I think it’s largely dependent on what your aim for a competition is as well. Clicks are nice and all, but in my opinion, don’t really push me along to any goals. Nice experiment, I’ll try something else next time.

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