need a contest idea...

Im trying to think of the same thing for my site. Travis was saying to hide little images in the pages, and have users find them. I think this is more appropriate for my site (and his) as they are entertainment. You are probably looking for more of a professional contest. How about article writings or something that will ultimately benefit echodev.

Ravi

Design contests are always good ways to grab the people.

Articles, hiding Images, and a million other ideas. However, the best idea would be to make something, as Ravi Said, that would ultimately benefit you.

Yeah, a cool contest would be to create a 5 page site on yourself. The winner won't be the best entry content wise, but design wise. That would be a cool contest, but I doubt it would bring it a few hundred entries since not everyone is good at design. Maybe try something everyone can do like the "hide images" idea.

The hidden images one sounds like a good idea. What would be a good reward for a non webmaster re-lated site. You could offer advertising but then again they might not have a site.

All those sound like good ideas, so my post will focus more on promoting the contest. Of course, you'll make a seperate page for it on your site, and all the network sites.

Then ask people who own webmaster resource sites (myself included ) To echange frontpage links, your link being to the contest page.

Send out an announcement in your newsletter.

As others to send out announcements in their newsletters.

Participate in webmaster banner exchanges and promote your contest.

Hope this helps.

You could do one where people try to find typos on your site. Then, when they find one, fill out a form for the contest and make sure they tell exactly where they found the error and what it was. Then, do a drawing of all the people that catch errors. Or maybe just the first 100, whatever works best for you.

This would be a good way to get people to read and explore your site.

--Edge

Here's another problem. I expect to receive at least 500 applicants for this contest. If I'll do everything manually, it'll take me forever... so I need a contest that wouldn't require TOO MUCH of... me.

Boris

[Edited by echoweb on 07-31-2000 at 04:06 PM]

How about “recommend this site to your friends and enter to win free hosting”? There are tons of pre-made send-to-a-friend scripts. With a little modification you could completely automate the contest.

I did this for a client of mine about a year ago. He only got about 20,000 page views but if I remember right we had over 2000 entries in 6 weeks.

This sounds good. Could you tell me the name of the script you used, by any chance? Also, how could I modify it so that the more people a visitor will refer, the more chances he will get in winning.

Also, how about this for a contest? We have a very powerful top-sites script which we can use. People can sign up and link to our site which creates extra traffic for us... in a while, we review the results and give users who brought us the most visitors our prizes according to the number of clicks we received from them?

Boris

I dunno about the "refer visitors" contest.

That gives the dominating sites an unfair advantage.

What about the small site that's just starting out in their web site, and wants to get some free hosting?

The Refer a Friend thing is a good idea, but only if you can prevent the reffering to the same email address more than once, otherwise sneaky little cheaters will send the refer thing to themselves over and over again.

Just my thoughts . . .

I also think that tell-a-friend contest is a better idea, I just need to find a good script that will allow me to do something like that.

As for cheaters, I think that a good script will let me monitor the activity, so I don't think that's a problem.

Also, I need that script to write the email of a person who recommended our site in a separate file for each person he recommends.

That way, I can email all of them at the same time and use a script to pick a random winner (the more entries there are, the more chances of winning you have).

Any ideas?

Boris

The "tell-a-friend" contest sounds like a great idea. No skill required so anyone can enter...

The typo one is a great idea too, IMO.

As I asked before what would be a good reward if the person does not have a site instead of free advertising or other web things like free hosting.

95% of our visitors are webmasters meaning that the majority of them have a website...

Boris

Check out the contest URL in my sig. Thanks to everyone who was helping me with the ideas and creating of this contest. Thanks a lot.

Boris