Blogging Tips

Over the last few months I have had over a dozen requests for BloggingTips to sponsor a blog competition. I have not put forward a prize for any of these competitions and since I still get these emails from time to time, I would like to explain why I do not (usually) sponsor any blog competitions

First of all, I would like to point out that I enjoy helping out other people on the web, be it a friendly link to a good post a blogger has wrote or helping someone with an HTML or CSS problem, I always try and do my best to help those who ask me for help.

Sponsors are rarely getting a good deal

Competitions are a great way to promote your blog however 9 times out of ten the sponsors of a blog competition are getting an extremely bad deal. In the last year I have seen loads of blogs hosting competitions with thousands of dollars in prizes. In most of these competitions the owner has put up very little money or sometimes nothing at all towards the prize total. Instead, they have relied on the help and generosity of other bloggers and ad networks. Great situation for the owner, great situation for the blog readers but a not so great situation for the blog sponsors. The main reason : an extremely poor return for the money they invested.

There are two main reasons for this :

• Too many sponsors : This is the biggest reason why I have not sponsored the last few competitions. The blog owner has sent me a nice email asking me to help them out so I check out their competition details. This is when I usually see 30+ sponsors listed in the competition post. In their quest to see the total prize money for their competition increase the blogger has added more and more sponsors and with each sponsor added the overall return for each sponsor gets less and less. Most blogs I have seen do not even give their sponsors a banner or image link back, all the sponsor gets is a text link which is quickly lost in a competition post where up to 30% of the post text is a link.
• Blog owner is asking for too much : The bigger your blog is the easier it becomes for the owner to secure sponsors. However, this is a detail which some people forget. Last month, I got a request from a blogger to sponsor a prize worth $50. Not only did the blog have less than 200 subscribers, the competition already had 20 other sponsors (Needless to say, I quickly declined the invitation to sponsor the competition).

I don’t blame blog owners for trying to get more sponsors to increase the prize money in their competition as the higher the prize total, the more publicity their blog will get. However, I do believe that along the way some blog owners are getting a bit greedy and not doing enough to give their sponsors value for money. Sponsoring a competition is good PR for any company or blog but business is business and no company can afford to just throw their money away and not expect any return.

The last competition I sponsored was the massive $54,000 competition that ProBlogger had last year. I gave away a Logitech Keyboard. Unfortunately, with over 100 sponsors of this competition I got less than 10 visits for my $100+ expenditure. Anyway you look at it, thats a poor return. Darren Rowse did his best to encourage his readers to visit the sponsors of the competition but with so many sponsors it’s no surprise that exposure was low. You also have to remember that a high percentage of blog readers will not even visit the sponsors regardless of what the blog owner does as all they are interested in are the prizes.

So how would you run a competition?

BloggingTips has had a few competitions in the past however I have never organised sponsors for the competition. Either I put up some cash or a prize myself or a company contacted me offering a prize to readers (so that they can some exposure to their new product).

If I was to host a competition with sponsors putting up prizes I would try to keep sponsors to a minimum (say, less than 7). Each sponsor would get an image or banner in the competition thread and a brief description of their company, website or product. Why would I do this? Well, my hope would be that by giving sponsors a lot of exposure they would be interested in sponsoring future competitions. This may sound like I’ve watched Jerry Maguire too many times but I am of the opinion that building a solid relationship with your advertisers and sponsors is in your interest and theirs. You obviously don’t want to annoy readers with sponsor details all the time but generally speaking I’d say most readers are ok with this if there are some prizes up for grabs.

Overview

I did not write this post to discourage people from sponsoring competitions and I do believe that it can be a good way to promote your blog. However, the recent trend of building a prize pool by getting more and more sponsors in and rewarding these sponsors with no more than a text link has discouraged people like myself from participating.

Of course, as a sponsor you can always donate something which does not require you to reach for your wallet (eg. an advertisement on your blog) though you should still be looking for a good return.

If you are thinking of hosting a competition on your blog my advice to you is this :

• For Yourself : You’ll probably be putting up some prizes yourself and no doubt you will be spending a lot of time arranging everthing so you want to get as much traffic and publicity as you can. Contact bloggers who can post about your competition and do some networking via social media sites.
• For the Sponsors : Try and give your sponsors as much exposure as possible. You don’t have to ram your sponsors down your readers day after day. By keeping sponsors to a minimum and using images and banners to promote your sponsors you should see more readers to check them out. Remember, if the sponsor is happy with traffic and feedback from your blog they are more likely to work with you again.
• For your Readers : Make the competition fun and easy to enter. Competitions where the winner is decided randomly is ok but one which engages the readers and rewards them for doing something is much better.

Have you run a competition or sponsored a prize in one? If so, please leave a comment and tell us your side of the story