Comments on: Why I will not sponsor your blog competition

By: Natasha @ Maw Books

Natasha @ Maw Books — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:11:12 +0000

I'm currently right in the middle of my most successful competition I've ever done. I've got two sponsors, a hot topic, it's easy to enter and people have told me that they've never had so much fun entering a contest before. You can see it here: http://blog.mawbooks.com/2008/06/16/win-all-of-st... I agree about limiting sponsorship. Picking your sponsors is just as important. They drove a lot of traffic my way. I hope that I've driven some of my regular readers to them as well. Thanks for the tips!

By: facebook

facebook — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:05:39 +0000

You really have some good points. I agree with you. You have told me some nice things

By: rob

rob — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:25:15 +0000

try limiting involvement to promos with a "short" list of sponsorships and premium placement for "bloggingtips". some sponsoships on growing blogs can make sense

good luck

By: Martin Jamieson

Martin Jamieson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:41:25 +0000

Yeah, if the sponsor doesn't get value from it, there's really no point taking it any further… they may as well just ask you for free beer money.

There are heaps of these emails going around at the moment, even smaller bloggers are getting these emails – I don't think most of them really care who they target, it's more a numbers game than anything.

I guess if you had something relatively inexpensive, like an ebook download to give away, then maybe you could offer that as a prize to a few of them… even then it's questionable whether you'd get anything for it and you still need to make sure it's something you want your name to be associated with.

By: Katy Castro

Katy Castro — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:47:30 +0000

I couldn't agree with you more. Competitions are everywhere these days and every time I see one it seems to become more and more confusing. The lack of exposure for each of the sponsors doesn't surprise me either.

Recently I ran the first competition ever for my blog and think I pulled it off quite successfully. I had just one sponsor (Wiley), and just one group of prizes (the ProBlogger book). Everywhere I promoted the competition, I always said that Wiley was the sponsor and did everything I could to encourage greater exposure for them.

While I'm unsure of how successful it was for them, I did get the thumbs up should I be interested in future sponsorships.

By: Si Philp

Si Philp — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:36:35 +0000

I had ran a competition a while back to promote my funky house podcast and to gain some back links

http://www.siphilp.co.uk/archive/2008/03/21/compe…

I have to say that it was a little more successful than i initially thought. The prizes were nothing spectacular but it was enough. I think if I done it again I would approach it differently, maybe making the tracks a little harder to guess or I would work with other house dj's who do podcasts to promote the scene.

Hardest thing I think is to try and be unique. Do something a little different with an edge

By: Internet Marketer

Internet Marketer — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:24:47 +0000

Yeah I totally agree with you. There needs to be something, some benefit towards the sponsor in order to sponsor such competitions. No benefit to the sponsor, is just a plain waste of money really.

Great blog and post.

Sincerely,

Jamie Boyle

Internet Marketer