There are very few tactics which can guarantee success in linkbuilding. Executed correctly, giving something away is one that gets close to fulfilling that promise.
This post covers competitions and giveaways; I'll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we've run for clients.
Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains. They can also be great for data collection - it's fine to ask the entrants for their email address and whether they'd be happy for you to send them emails again in the future.
Furthermore, there's a potential for increasing brand awareness amongst people who've not heard of you before.
Running a Giveaway
In the simplest competition users visit the website to fill out their details, possibly answer a simple question, and then a winner is picked out of the hat.
Competition Prizes
If you have high margin products, these can make attractive prizes without harming your bottom line too much (e.g.: giving away tickets for your theatre doesn't cost anything if the show isn't sold out.) You should also consider 'money can't buy' prizes: a trip to watch a rugby match is cool, but spending the day working for a national team and getting a signed jersey is priceless.
Look out for partnerships: when Distilled recently ran a whisky giveaway (to create buzz around the brand prior to the launch of our US office) we were sent messages by Jura whisky and Master of Malt (neither of whom we knew beforehand) offering some quite exceptional additional prizes.
There's potential to improve any competition by approaching suitable partners first, to offer some co-publicity and links. (I once emailed some contacts to ask for contributions to a competition, and ended up with £300 worth of books, £120 of CDs and DVDs, £50 of gift vouchers, two magazine subscriptions, a £120 digital camera, a wild animal adoption, a bottle of port and a towel that folded up into a beachbag.)
Of course, the flip side of this is that you could simply look out for people in industries related to you that are running competitions, and offer an additional prize for their promotion, in return for links, etc. You can use Google to find such opportunities: search for terms like 'win' and 'competition' alongside phrases used in relevant niches (eg: 'win album' for music prizes) and then filter down to results from the last week / month. For example: this Google search.
Get Listed
The 'comping' community is a great place to seed your competitions to begin. Certainly in the UK, a listing on a few active sites will often send the first 2 - 5,000 entrants - and I'm sure it's not just us limeys that love a freebie. Search around for sites to submit your competition to, but regional sites you could consider include:
- Loquax.co.uk (UK)
- ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
- Compaholics (UK)
- CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)
Seeding
Send competition details directly to twitter users & bloggers who you either know well, or think would be interested in covering it. Remember that people can be less inclined to share a competition if it's good enough (to give themselves better chances of winning.) There are various creative solutions to this issue, but you can just keep it simple and appeal to the blogger's love of sharing cool stuff with their readers.
Furthermore, look for opportunities to find partners who have email lists. Let's take two companies with email marketing lists: BigHotel (a large, fictional hotel chain) whoc is running a competition, and GreenTour (a successful, fictional eco-tourism site) which is launching a new feature. They have similar audiences, but there's no overlap between their products; BigHotel can mention the feature launch in their next newsletter and EcoTour can promote the competition to their subscribers. This just required finding a partner and making a gentleman's agreement; as Bonytoad is fond of saying: "Win-Win, For Teh Win."
Use Your Affiliates
Make sure that your affiliates can add their tracking codes to the entry URL, and they'll help to spread awareness of the competition pretty quickly and to places you might not be able to reach to otherwise.
Create a video primer
The Irish rugby competition mentioned above was launched with a 60 second video promoting the prize.
Videos are particularly shareable: embed codes can be copied from the Youtube page, and lots of social sites (including Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit) allow for easy importing of videos. Given that people might be watching the video anywhere, make sure to prominently display the URL for the entry page in the video, either on-screen or using video annotations.
Get Press
Lots of magazines and newspapers are happy to mention competitions and link to them from their websites. Find publications that target the geographic area or niche targetted by the competition. Pick up the phone and give them a call - ask to speak to someone who deals with promotions, or in the editorial department. A few minutes later you might have a decent link and some coverage that will be read by a very targeted group of people.
Maintain Momentum
When people have entered, it's a waste to just show them a 'thanks for entering' message. Use this opportunity to give a call to action - typically to share the competition with other people. Consider having a secondary prize that encourages people to share the competition. For example:
Click here to send a tweet, or enter your friends' email addresses below to send them a message.
Everyone who tweets / emails the competition will automatically be entered in a competition to win a set of steak knives.
Upsell the Competition
Have a successful competition, and want to take advantage of this get more entries? Take the email addresses of everyone who entered so far, and send them a message during the week before the competition finishes.
You recently entered our 'Win a Holiday for Two' competition through XYZ.com. The competition finishes in a week, and we'll be drawing the winner then.
We've had quite a few entries, but only 10% actually got the answer correct. It's only one entry per person, but if you have any friends, partners or siblings who might want to win a trip to the otherside of the world, then do let them know that they have a week left to enter. (Don't forget to remind them who sent them the link if they do win.....)
The entry page is still up at: www.xyz.com/win-a-holiday
Best wishes, etcetera
I've not done this, but I think it could work really well to add an extra 10% to your number of entries. To be honest, I'm considering not mentioning it here, and saving it for myself for a while, but I want to see what CTR & results anyone who tries it gets. Let me know if you have a chance.
Other Competition Structures
Outside of the basic 'name-out-of-a-hat' competitions, there's potential for all sorts of interesting competition structures.
Competitions to Encourage Engagement
Ooh.com run a competition with two $100 prizes each week. The winners are picked from the new 'OOHs' which have been uploaded, and encourages people to not only add their content, but to make sure it is as 'rich' as possible.
Sites with user generated content (such as a forum, social networking or social media site) could use similar techniques to reward particular contributions.
Twitter Competitions
A competition where the only entry requirement is to tweet a message including a link to a site / account / hashtag has very low barriers to entry for Twitter users. Once up and running, such competitions excel at keeping momentum - the more people hear about the competition, the more people enter - and help to improve brand awareness for companies and products.
The tactic's been used by a variety of organisations; the most famous execution was probably the competitions run by Moonfruit. This did well, but the concept already feels a little bit passé - plus you have to have an awesome product and spring for $10,000 of prizes to have the same impact that Moonfruit enjoyed.
Consider modifying this viral 'self-fullfilling prophecy' competition for other formats or networks; Umbro had people upload photos on Facebook - the Facebook 'News Feed' then showed entrants' friends that they'd submitted an entry. If you're looking to find similar success for your sites, Google Buzz is still new & cool... I'm just saying...
Procedural Points
A couple of miscellaneous points about operating a competition:
Conversion Rate Optimisation
If you've attracted people to the competition entry page, you should hope to see a very good conversion rate to completed entries. Try using some CRO techniques on the entry page, to maximise the number of entries received and the amount of useful data collected.
Avoid Cheats
Log the IP address along with each entry - you can then investigate any IP addresses which submit a lot of entries to identify people who are trying to cheat the system.
OK; I hope that this has been useful, or at least inspired you to go through the back of the cupboards, and see if you have anything interesting to give away. Using tactics like this can be an iterative process - it doesn't need to go exactly right first time, and people will never get bored if you run a few competitions to improve your process. Good luck!
I think there's a core point running through all of these tips that people need to hear - the better you plan a promotion, the more mileage you'll get from it. Don't think that, just by giving away an iPod, you'll magically get links and customers - there's a world of difference between a sloppy contest and a well-executed one.
I've also found there's a bit of a Catch-22 - you need things like contests to get links/traffic, but you can't really get a contest off the ground until you have a critical mass of traffic. Don't expect miracles - if you're a small/new site, you're really going to have to tap into your network to get a contest off the ground.
agreed!
i know big companies who throw thousands of dollars at email marketing driving masses of visitors each month, but still door poorly on conversion rates.
the other point since it is push marketing it doesnt build many of the links that a grassroot or social media promotion would have done :(
I think that's probably the most important thing to consider. Will you have the reach to make it a successful effort. It's no easy task, and you hit the nail on the head with the catch 22 analogy.
Many thanks for the mention. Great article about competitions, especially the cheating aspect.
I'd suggest doing more than collect IP addresses though. If you can monitor everything. Look for odd email addresses (for e.g. tisca instead of tiscali), rotate questions or answer position and/or avoid multi choice.
Loquax did an experiment where the entrant had to enter an answer (which was "one hour") when we looked at the data we found similar IPs all with the same well constructed answer ("one hour but maybe later on a Sunday."). I guess we should have published the findings.
From experience too few comp organisers check their data or entries. There are many automated services which dump you with x00 to x000 entries for people who never know about your site. You need to decide if you want to reward that entrant with the prize or someone who's actually engaged with your site and brand?
One final point I'd like to make is great to contact your entrants after the competition, but don't annoy them. Don't send a "You have won.. a discount" type email."Thank you for your entry. The winner was... as a thank you we'd like to do this.. Look out for more offers, prizes etc" .. much better.
And apologies in advance for writing so much.
Jason
Hi Jason,
Thanks for your comments, and your advice about looking out for fraudulent entries.
Your advice about the contents of a 'follow up' email is very useful - it's the best opportunity you have to turn entrants into people who like your brand and may interact again in the future, and a waste if you blow it by sending a poor email.
Big fan of linkbuilding posts :-) seems to be where people are holding most cards to their chest these days.
Stables recently ran a cool comeptition in Norway (rebranding of the norwegian name Binders). The winner had to say the new name "Stables" as for the prize.. he got close to 100 000 dollars in cash.
I think the tagline was "the best paid job around".
Great creative is often great linkbuilding :-)
Agree! Being creative is great link building. Where I work at Vertical Measures we run contests several times a year. This quarter is our "Ode to SEO" Scholarship Poetry Contest. We're giving away a $1,000 Scholarship or an iPad (winner chooses) to one lucky high school, college or grad student who simply writes a poem with three of our chosen keywords in it. These keywords range from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, to SEO, WWW, and link building. Hoping to get lots of entries before Friday's deadline!
Although I wholeheartedly support and champion creativity when it comes to link dev, as a comms professional with more than 14 years experience (yes, I know, I'm ancient), I have to stick my big butt in here. There is lots of tactics within this post and I think we need to clarify what's genuinely achiveable and what's not.
There is also so much opportunity with creative content, this post doesn't even scratch the surface.
It's not just "selling in a competition" that we're talking about here, it's creating content and creating link bait, selling in a competition to a big national media partner and selling in competitions to smaller nich sites - all of which are great, but all require different approaches.
Selling in a competition to a niche site that has a small audience isn't the biggest challenge, they often welcome the content and give you a link. But securing a link from an authoritative site that is going to give you real SEO value, is really difficult - certainly in the UK & Northern Europe. Why would a national media partner link out to you when they have all the collateral right there on their page in the form of the competition prize? It may be different in other regions, but negotiating data-capture through a media partner in the UK is also notoriously difficult unless you pay for it.
Running competitions on your own or your client's sites is easy, but it's when you try and publicise these comps via media outlets, rather than micro blogging and social media or through commercial partners that it gets more challenging.
Absolutley let's celebrate real creativity and try as many routes to link dev as possible, but calling influential media partners with little or no experience can sometimes do more harm than good and surely creating link bait and genuinely exclusive collateral for those bigger and more authorative sites is a more targeted and beneficial way of spending our clients money, than scatter gunning a load of small sites to maybe get a link?
The content creation side of things is where this post gets really interesting and as an agency with a dedicated team of content creators, copywriters and online PR professionals, this is what we've been doing for a few years now.
Investing in creativity, taking a step back and thinking strategically about how you can use your teams creativity and relationship building skills, learning more about your target media outlets before you pick up the phone (and yes, please think about talking to people) is absolutley where the future is. As an industry, we need to do so much more than competitions.
The industry is on the verge of some awesomely exciting creative ways of thinking - get tradditional comms people involved, teach them how they can influence your clients natural search results and use their creative skills to get those ideas flowing and the bigger picture forming.
Sorry to thumbs down you, guys, but there is so much more to learn and do.
ALSO! just realised I'm going to get panned for not sharing what creative link dev tools we use - more than happy to do this, I too disbelieve in holding cards to chest - check us out and get in touch if you're interested.
Very helpful!
The timing of this post is uncanny, as we have been putting together some ideas for weekly giveaways for our blog. Several weeks ago, we decided that it would be an excellent way to generate brand awareness, and maybe a few backlinks...I guess we were on the right track!
Anywho, I think we've settled on giving away an IronKey each week, for a month.
If you don't know what an IronKey is, I strongly suggest you check out the IronKey website.
Cheers!
I have to agree, it was a bit uncanny as I am awaiting the arrival of donations from user's of the site that will be used for the monthly giveaway. Partnerships are a no-brainer, and you would be surprised how willing users, visitors, or other brands will be if you just go ahead and ask.
Linkbuilding is easily one of the hardest facets of SEO Rob, and like mnnorge commented above, it's where sharing tips like you have, really sets you above those of us who hoard our tricks o' the trade.
Thanks for sharing all these ideas. This post is going to the top of my linkbuilding file.
And thanks for sucking up an hour of my morning with your whiskey giveaway link. I had to look up all those whiskey's unknown to me (I'm a Jack Daniel's man) then I got sucked up in the time warp learning about Burn's Night and watching YouTubes of "Toasts to the Lassie's".
Must...have...more...self...control!
awesome, just need to have enough time in the budget to implement some of these ideas...
I try to focus on conversion rate optimisation early in the process but it can be continually improved using tools like website optimiser and can often be forgotten until later in a campaign.
Just in the process of launching competitions for link building, so this post has been very helpful!
Has given me great points to think about that I hadn't considered, such as using affiliates to promote competition
P.S. Great to see some UK representation on SEOmoz!
....automatically be entered in a competition to "with" a set of steak knives?
Should be "win"
Sorry, but I always get called out for my mistakes as well!
Fixed :)
Just to add to the post above, there are strict laws governing competions and giveaways in the UK - check before going live!
Excellent article.
I don't know if it's worth mentioning but the link to the Youtube video linked to in this sentence isn't working anymore 'The Irish rugby competition mentioned above was launched with a 60 second video promoting the prize.'
Thanks again.
Thanks for the post. I'll be sharing this with a company that is starting this as a monthly thing. Their approach is to allow the user to design a product online and they then enter that design into a competition. They then invite the public to vote on the designs and the top ones get a star prize and the top XXX all get the designed item produced and posted to them.
By adding in the public vote they are more likely to get backlinks as the designer is more likely to share it with their audiences to get votes.
I've seen this work in the past when another company has offered £500 to the charity of your choice and allowed people to submit charities and then get votes on who should get the cash.
Hi Rob
I've been running a local competitions website in South Africa, https://www.winstuff.co.za for a while now and I've never thought of this angle when featuring my clients' competitions. I will definitely make mention of it in future. I would also like to ask if you would be so kind to include my latest UK competitions website in your list, https://www.winstuffuk.co.za, we're just starting out and we could do with a link from you :) If possible, also please include one for our South African site https://www.winstuff.co.za. Thanks.
indeed giveway provide many positive things in link building, but for a beginner blogger who has no more capital seemed only a dream, like my , I made this to learn how to manage blogs well, maybe only way to build links with a comment like this
a combination of tips written here and the one you did on social media giveaways can make for some serious promotion. Now it's back to the board with my thinking cap on, must do my own resaerch and start something :)
Social media give me the best results for contests and sweepstakes!
One of the websites I write for frequently runs contests and gets a great response.
The site is pretty well known already, so the contests are really more of a reward for the readers than for SEO purposes, but running contests for them has shown me how powerful a contest can be for link building purposes.
Great ideas and very thorough! Especially like the idea of challenging entrants to upload photos on facebook. And too often when I run contests I forget to reach out to sites that spread the word about freebies like wisebread.com and others.
Thanks!
There is one very critical thing missing in this post and that is the legalities of running a contest or giveaway. Having run several contests in the past, this can be a major stumbling block if you do not focus on this from the beginning.
A few takeaways from past experience:
For charity clients (501c3), you are not held to such a high standard (those people in bullet three above know they probably can't milk a non-profit for anything...plus, it make THEM look bad if outed). But for corporate clients with brand, absolutely must run this by legal for proper terms and conditions, etc. BEFORE you waste a lot of energy on brainstorming and marketing... because they could shoot it down because of the risk.
Sean Elkin
Great tips.
I think this is especially a great approach for startups or for those who haven't built out a strong brand yet...at that point, the desirability of and recognition for the brands used for the giveaway help to carry the competition.
Checkout the early blog entries for www.Alice.com (from the same founders who started Jellyfish, later acquired by and turned into Microsoft's Bing Cachback program). Lots of little contests were used to build buzz and a Twitter/Facebook following early on, even prior to the site being open to the public. That's some great pre-launch karmic buzz.
What I also liked about some of their giveaways was the incorporation of user stories...they built on some good user interaction and sharing early on.
Great ideas! We've been keeping contests/giveaways in the backs of our heads for a while now; just haven't had the time to get them rolling. Maybe we can act upon these ideas and actually implement them now! I also think we just didn't know where to start.
I did read somewhere on SEOmoz not too long ago that Facebook has been cracking down on contests due to legality issues; I think they said you could promote a contest on Facebook as long as the actual contest was held on a different website (your own website).
Thanks for the great info!
:)
Not just on FB actually!
Each country has its own sets of competition rules, so make sure you check your country's current regulation or else some competitor might have a field day...
Would have to suit the audience in my opinion.
For niche markets I think the Press is a good option but
the angle has to interesting. You have to be doing something unique to stand out from the crowd. Most people, businesses don't bother with interacting with something that is too predictable or they've seen too many times before. Competitions are great if you have good creative but this is very rare.
Great post, Rob. Thanks
Giveaway is no doubt one of the most effective link building methods out there. People love to get free or discounted stuff, and they will be motivated to give a link back.
For the competition, I think the biggest problem would be cheating, some folks ask their friends to vote them, or even ask the same person to keep voting it. It's really important to let people vote only once, otherwise, your reputation is easy to be ruined and people will no longer get involved anymore.
I'm a few years late on this one, but would it really be a problem if people asked their friends to vote? After all, this is how the message will be spread.
Does anyone have a list of "comping" sites that have a US community?
Hey There,
I haven't got a full list for you (unfortunately) but I have done a bit of searching for myself. The following sites seem to have a decent US section and following:
https://www.onlinecompetitions.com/index.php/online-competitions/usa.html
https://onlinecompetitions.org/ (not as easy to submit to, but try dropping them an email)
https://competearoundtheworld.com/ (when it's working)
https://www.contestguide.com/webmasters.html
https://www.competitionfreebiesusa.com/
https://forums.online-sweepstakes.com/
https://www.sweepsadvantage.com/smf/
https://www.freesamplesite.com/ydf/forumdisplay.php?20-Contests-Sweepstakes
https://www.gottadeal.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=21
It is also worth noting that the forums on Money Saving Expert also have a fairly strong audience in the US.
Anyways, hope this is of some help! When in doubt I would say definitely go with "sweepstakes" this seems to be a more common term for comping lovers in the States and should help find US specific comping sites.
Thanks for the tips!
Oh cool, Sam - I was just looking for resources in better advertising my own $25 Paypal Cash giveaway at https://www.geekandjock.com/25-paypal-cash-giveaway
Thanks so much for your list which will make things easier in finding more sources for getting the message out.
Thanks for all of these ideas... Can't wait to implement some sections to test them with our website.
I would be curious to get a list of websites to "get listed" in U.S./Canada... :)
Competitions are complete linkbait and I love them (having won one of them myself - see the InspiredMagazine/Firehost graphics tablet competition).
I'm a little worried about chatting to the guys at work about it. I think building a brand that can be fun/trusted is good, but the clients we handle might not like it. It would be fantastic if we could run a campaign like this.
Rob,
Excellent advice on this post. Thanks!
I recently launched a Contest Platform which allows anyone to run contests/giveaways/promotions using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google FriendConnect, Digg, or FriendFeed OAuth. The site should hopefully make it easier for contest organizers to run an online contest.
The site is called https://skril.com. I would love to hear your feedback if you have the time.
I also wrote a blog post about contest promotion tactics this weekend. I'm going to update it an include a link to this post.
You can read more here: https://blog.skril.com/post/14/Guerrilla-Contest-Promotion-Tactics
Thanks for sharing so many tactics.
In my experience with competitions I find the following equation pretty spot on:
value (or perceived value) of prize / cost of entry = amount of entrants
Cost of entry imo is the level of effort required and possibility of being spammed.
Example: retweeting a message is a pretty low cost of entry because it requires low effort and there is not much risk of being spammed.
Writing a blog post as an entry is a much higher level of effort.
Signing up for an email list is low effort, but the risk of being spammed is much higher.
What a wealth of information for one blog post. Seriously I need to read it atleast 3 times to digest all the ideas and the implementation in this post.
Thanks
PS- I will be looking to implement some of this great ideas in my websites linkbuilding