It has been over a month since we concluded our blog contest. Many had emailed asking me how well the contest went and if I would recommend doing something similar with other blogs. I wanted to wait a little while before I posted an assessment of what worked and what did not work during the contest to carefully consider the results.

Goals

Prior to June the blog was not a main focus of ours. Posting was sporadic at best.  Although the blog had daily traffic of around 100 visitors, I do not think we had any RSS subscribers. As part of our push to engage with the online community a bit more, we decided to make couple of changes to better utilize our blog as a means for communication. First, we decided to post at least three times a week. Second, switch our blog to a more search engine/ visitor friendly platform.

I have always believed that RSS membership is a cornerstone of a good blog. It gives a great sense of a community around the blog. So the goal of the contest was to increase the number of RSS subscribers between 50 on the low end to 300 on the high end.

RSS membership

Our rss membership level jumped up by 130 during the month we ran the contest. Many had warned that the membership level will drop down after the contest.  It is natural to assume that people will subscribe until the end of the contest, and then unsubscribe. That was the main reason I held off on writing this post to get a better idea of how well the contest worked. I am glad to share that our membership did not drop down since the contest finished over a month ago. As a matter of fact the number of RSS subscribers is steadily increasing.

Links

Although generating links to the blog was not one of the primary goals of running the contest, the blog received close to 40 links as a result.

Daily visitors

I am not sure if I can relate this directly to the contest or if it is a result of the regular posting schedule that we decided to stick with. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, our daily blog traffic was around 50 visitors per day. As of writing this post, our average traffic is between 300-500 visitors per day.

Comments

This is the other indicator of how well a blog is working. I have always said that a blog without comments is a very lonely place. Prior to the contest, there were too many days were blogs did not receive any comments. Since we ran the contest, we had a total of 60 posts with 354 comments on them. The community engagement has been tremendous and very rewarding.

Conversations

This is probably one of the best results of the contest. Our team members including myself became much more involved with the online community. Whether it is via forums, blogs or social networking sites, we have established very valuable relationships. There is no way to put a value on these relations.

Lessons Learned

•  Setting up a contest with a large prize is not enough to market it. I can here people say duh! The response to the contest was not strong during the first week. Marketing and promoting the contest for a new blog takes a lot of effort.
• If you want to run a contest, consider setting goals that must be met before prize is given away. I was very pleased with the increase in the RSS membership we received. But I have seen other blog where the RSS level needs to hit a certain level prior to the giving the reword.
• Consider adding other rewards to the contest besides the monetary value. I liked what Ben did by getting Chris Garrett to write for blogging experiment contest winner. How about paying for a review me post for the contest winner from a big name blogger?

Would we run the contest again?

This is the question that truly determines the success of the contest. And the simple answer is, (drum roll please) YES we will.