Charles Lau dot Com

Introduction
This is a great marketing strategy adopted by John Chow in his endeavours in helping people to make money online.  There are so many contest marketing that a new blog has been created because of it.  We have a contest blogger born to help people who wishes to hold contests… This post is inspired by what John Chow has been doing in his blog…
Thoughts
As I was reviewing all the various people doing contest marketing, many people seem to have doubt working on it. One of the very obvious reason is that their blogs aren’t as popular enough to enter such a contest.  Just imagine giving away a free LCD monitor, while your traffic is too little to adopt it.  Probably only 12 people wrote a review of you because of that LCD monitor, and in the end you are at a loss.

Having said so, I realise how much Internet business has in common with many physical businesses out there.  It is basically a chicken-and-egg problem for having such a contest.  It’s either you don’t have enough supplies, or you don’t have enough demand. Usually, the problem is with insufficient demand since supplies can be easily solved with money.

How to Start A Contest Marketing

1. How much traffic you really want to attract?  Is it a lot?
2. Choose a prize which is measurable to the traffic you will want to pay for.  A car will probably attract millions if you do it properly.  A laptop might attract between 10,000 to 100,000 visitors.  You can measure it by $0.50 per visitor.
3. What do you want your traffic to do to own that prize?  You can ask your traffic to do a linkback with some phrase you wanted.  Or probably, you want your traffic to write some comments in your blog?  Or probably, you want your traffic to buy something even?  Or maybe you just need your visitors to apply for that prize lucky draw?
4. Set a deadline.  Depending on the prize value, you may have to work out how long your visitors have to wait to get that prize… I won’t mind waiting for one year for that BMW car… And if the deadline is reaching and you haven’t reached your target traffic, you can even add something on to it while not changing the original conditions.. Just be careful with your modifications as you have to take care of the people who first applied for the lucky draw.
5. Done!

Conclusion
I think this is really worth it.  Just think about the Google Adwords where I may pay $0.10 for every visitor.  I can pay $500 for 5000 visitors or more in equivalent… And in return, they are linking me back to increase my search result position.