MacTips Discussions

MacTips Discussions

Ideas for Contest Giveaway

1. Brad MacTips Owner 5 months ago

   Hey guys,

   As I'm sure you know the last giveaway was a huge success, so I wanted to do more of these. I contacted Pixelmator and they agreed to giveaway 2 licenses to any MacTips users.

   What I'm looking for are ideas on how to best give these away. The previous way definitely worked well, but I don't think it got as many people involved in the site as I'd hoped.

   Here are some thoughts I've been throwing around on the best way to do this:

   Twitter: Get people to follow me on twitter and then announce on twitter the first two to comment on the post win. This will allow me to send out tweets to people in the future, and build traffic to the site.

   Reason: Make people give a reason why they should win the license. Then choose the best two answers. This is subjective, however--and still doesn't really involve users with the site.

   Sign-up at Forums: Get users to sign-up at the forums and the more posts you make the higher your chances are of winning.

   So far I'm leaning towards the twitter option. This is something that will be very valuable in the future. I'm afraid the other two ways, users will comment and then leave. Twitter gives me a way of reaching out to them in the future.

   So what are your thoughts? I'd like to have this going by this weekend, so let me hear them.

   
   

2. travisjeffery Renaissance Man 5 months ago

   I think Twitter would we be a good idea, but it should be under a name like MacTipsdotorg or MacintoshTips (MacTips is gone or did one of you get it? -- cause nobody has posted to it), I got MacintoshTips which is the 2nd best. TUAW does the same thing and so do a lot of other sites.

   I'll give you guys the password if that's what we go with and then we can all post to it -- things like new posts, contests, polls and such.

   
   

3. MichaelZhao Finder of Lost Children 5 months ago

   i like the forums idea, i'd really like to see the forums take off. i think running a forum would be really fun. btw, i'm gone for the weekend.

   
   

4. omerzach MacTips Writer 5 months ago

   I think Twitter would be great if a significant percentage of MacTips visitors are actually Twitter users, which I'm not so sure about.

   Having it through the forums could be good, since it directly positively contributes to the site.

   
   

5. Discerptor Member 5 months ago

   I don't like the Twitter idea too much because not that many people actually have Twitter most likely (and people may just sign up and abandon the account). This goes hand-in-hand with why you and I both don't like the forums idea (plus we don't want to suddenly be spammed with obvious "+1"-type posts for the sake of increasing winning odds), and you've covered why the giving a reason for being a worthy winner one is not optimal as well.

   I think an interesting idea would be for winner-hopefuls to submit Mac OS X tips to the website. Serious entries would be posted (you could create some kind of criteria for what this means and post them as rules), and a poll could then be held for which tip was considered the best one. The "winners" of this poll would get the site licenses. I believe this is an excellent way of doing this, because not only does it encourage your visitors to explore their Macs and likely the depths of the site as well to see what a "good tip" is like, but I think it helps build towards the goal of this website's primary tip source becoming its entire community. If enough people who do this see how cool the site is and decide to stick around, I think it fulfills everything you could hope for out of a simple contest with prizes.

   
   

6. Brad MacTips Owner 5 months ago

   Discerptor, Nice idea. That may be the best option here.

   
   

7. Brandon Hopkins Moderator 5 months ago

   Hey, I've liked contests that encourage content creation on MacTips.org. Ideas:

   1 entry for a comment.
   3 entries for a trackback.
   20 entries for a published post on the MacTips.org homepage.
   1 entry for each post in the forums.

   Each of those make the site better while providing the site with free content as well.

   
   

8. Discerptor Member 5 months ago

   Out of curiosity, how did the contest go in terms of amount/quality of entries?

   
   

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