Does anyone ever hold contests and free product give aways for their members? Does it work, or does it only work during the contest period then everything goes back to normal?

I'm getting ready to run my first test at the whole thing, You can read all about the give away at Top-vB here

At another forum i own, we give away prizes, but it doesnt appear to be doing so well. So i figured running two tests would see if it works or not

Contests work with the proper planning. Traffic will die back down of course, but with the proper planning you should be able to retain some of the traffic.

• Advertise to your target audience
• Have a gameplan read for after the contest ends.

The keys here is bringing people to the contest that would be intersted in what your forum has to offer rather than people just showing up for free stuff and an opportunity to spam their own things. Once your contest ends, have some things planned to keep the forum interesting or you will immediately die back down to the level you began at.

Consider a paid posting campaign to take place once your contest gets started, and have it continue for a while after the contest is over. (not all forums are good candidates for paid posting, but many are.)

I am in the process of testing my first purchase of paid posting from the guys at Forum Elevation to see how well it goes.

Hopefully it helps as well

Done a few free cruise give-a-aways.. Always fun and brings nice traffic and some stays sticky.

ill be conducting a pretty big contest run on my forum starting from July

basically the idea is to offer books/cd's and other stuff each month for a period of 1 year.

Ive already set the budget to not exceed 500 bucks(for the year) so thats basically about 40 bucks per prize per month. Ill set the prizes as a choice (books OR cds OR dvds OR etc) within the 40 bucks range of course.

The good thing about running it for a whole year straight I believe is that its gona bring in regular traffic as opposed to a boost and thn die down....

So while the competition continues each month every month for a year...people get used to the website and forums.

Also its a good idea to base your competitions on TIME as opposed to post....EG:

DONT DO: who ever reaches 500 posts first wins
BUT DO: whoever posts the most during this month

this way I believe people wont abuse your contest by posting rubish to reach the 500 target etc.

Also set your rules and make them VERY clear that peoples posts will be monitored for 'spamming' and ridiclous replies. And if a count of 3 violations is reached...they will be out for that month from the competition.

anyways thats my plan just thought id share

aku, you're a sneaky little devil.



I like that

I installed the recipe mod and really had no problem with the instructions. However for some reason <------recipe mod database------> shows up in between posts. I've attached a screen cap in hopes of better explaining. Can you tell me how to make that not show up? Thanks!

looks like you forgot the < in front of the !--

Should Look like:

<!-- test here -->

--------------------

ok that sounds easy enough but where would I check for that? (postbit legacy, new thread etc...)

found it thank you!