Lessons Learned From a Failed Contest
As you may or may not know that I’m implicated in Server-Side Magazine.
The website was started about a month ago. At this time me and another guy writing the articles, but we wanted to open this site for everyone who wishes to get a little coverage for his website/blog by writing cool, but strictly server side programming language related articles.
The site got and still getting pretty good visits every day, Google and other major search engines indexed the pages already, but the main problem was that we were steadily lacking articles to put up on the site, so we thought we give a little incentive for the community who visits the site and read the articles.
So we organized a contest, we wanted to gave out $200 Amazon Gift Card for the user who submits an article and gets good comments, diggs, bookmarks, etc. all in all brings traffic to the website. More on the rules you can found here.
We thought this would bring at least 10 articles, because we got plenty of visits for that post, but we didn’t got a single article just a lot of prospects who were interested in writing.
After the failure of the contest I started to think what could possibly went wrong? The price was to small? Or, because we wanted to give a gift card and not cash?
The real problem was that when we started the contest, the website was just 3 weeks old. It is a very early stage to organize such events. Everybody was interested to write an article, but the website didn’t had the authority yet. People thought “Why should I write an article for an unknown site just to get $200? Maybe I won’t even receive it, I don’t trust in this site yet…
In my opinion, this is perfectly fine. Lessons learned, I hope with steady and quality content the website will gain authority in it’s niche and hopefully it will be an information hub. And maybe when this happens then we start a new contest, because I myself believe that in order to get something you have to give back too.
Comments
December 1st, 2008
I really appreciate this post! It means you’re taking this small failure as an opportunity to get better next time. Kudos to you for that and for the openness!
December 1st, 2008
I personally didn’t want to go for the contest even though I wanted to give it a shot as a writer for server side magazine just because I wanted my writing to be for the readers not for me. So once it all went over the hedge I submitted an article.
I don’t think people who want to give something to the community should do it for a prize but for the will to share. As for the so called failure, I would rather name it a fallow-up on things. The whole concept is still young yet powerful.
The great thing is that you are still pushing further and that one day you will look back at this and have a nice laugh.
Gratz for the effort you’ve put in all this.
December 2nd, 2008
Hey, Filip did you know that Kudos means error?
But all in all thanks for the comment, oh and you too Stelian