Easter Egg Hunt WINNERS! (and a contest summary)
If you’ve been to my blog over the last week you probably would have noticed that I had been running an Easter Egg Hunt. The prize for 10 winners is a free of copy of my up-coming StumbleUpon course. Many of you spotted the fact that the contest was not just an opportunity to be generous but also to draw some links into the blog. At the end of the post I expand on my thoughts behind the contest and what it actually achieved.
Announcing the 10 Lucky Winners!
The way that the contest was structured meant that not all contestants had an equal chance of winning. I put all of the entries into a ‘hat’ and used a random number generator to pick winners. As a winner was selected, their entries were removed from the contest thus raising the chances of the remaining contestants.
Here are the winners in the order in which they were selected:
- Jennifer Piepenburg
- Blogging Cents
- Mirjam
- Ben Helps
- Lisa (Rhoner?)
- Lolo’s Way
- Louis Liem
- Mark Mason
- Paul Darby - Please contact me!
- Erica DeWolf
Goals of the Contest
Funnily enough the idea for the contest came to me by accident. I knew that I had no intention of doing very much work over the 4 days of Easter and I was wondering what to post on the blog on Good Friday. I didn’t really want to do a pillar post because I knew traffic would be low but I didn’t want to just abandon the blog for the whole time either. The idea for an easter egg hunt just popped into my head.
So the first goal was simply to do something fun and different over Easter as usually this blog is all work, work, work (snore…) However once I started to think about it I realised that I could use the idea to bring some real benefits. My goals were:
- To encourage people to read my old content
- To get back links into important posts & pages on the blog
- To allow me to quietly announce my StumbleUpon course to other bloggers
Mistakes I Made
Such a simple contest and yet I managed to make quite a few mistakes with it! Firstly, as one of my readers pointed out it was very easy to cheat because I had just enabled trackbacks on the blog which meant that as soon as somebody posted links to the eggs they would be linked on this blog allowing other people to cheat by copying them! This still allowed me to get backlinks but it meant that those people wouldn’t be looking through the posts.
The second mistake I made was not specifically asking for the links to be do-follow. Several of the entries I received had the ‘nofollow’ tag added to the links meaning that they were useless as backlinks. I did ask for them to be changed and some did but seeing as I failed to mention it in the original post I didn’t discount any of those entries.
Lastly, I should have explicitly asked for contestants to provide an email address in their entry as I have several winners that I can only contact via a contact form on their blog and there is one blogger who doesn’t even have that so I have no way to email these people with the course once it is released.
Results Achieved
Surprisingly only 21 people took part in the contest. However the good news for me is that a lot of those entries were made by bloggers and this resulted in over 400 new back links to the blog. I can’t see what effect this will have now but it might help my search engine rankings over the longer term.
Traffic wise, it’s hard to say because traffic was expected to be down over a bank holiday period. The number of unique visitors went down but the page views stayed quite high so this indicates that those that did come to the blog probably looked through quite a few pages.
This is where analytics can come in handy. Another statistic that I looked at was the time spent on the site. This reached 4.46 minutes on March 20th which is almost a minute higher than the average for the weeks beforehand so I suppose that is fairly good.
The nicest thing though is that today I see that my subscriber numbers are almost at 1800 which is a nice jump from before the weekend where it had been hovering around the 1750 mark. Of course the subscriber numbers always fluctuate a lot but it looks like the contest had a small postitive impact on it.
Overall I would say that the contest didn’t get as much attention as I hoped it would, but it got enough attention to bring the blog more traffic than it would have got otherwise for a bank holiday period. It’s also brought me some permanent links which are always a good thing!
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Stumble it!
Lori
March 25, 2008
WOOHOO! I’m happy to be one of the winners:) YEAH!
There was actually another way to “cheat” but I won’t say how;)
Lori’s last blog post..Analyzing My Guest Post on Problogger.net