Offer A Contest On Your Website To Attract Visitors

Don’t we all just love to win? Something, anything, just to say we’ve won. That’s why lottery tickets and poker have become so popular. It’s the thrill of the win. And if you are a smart website owner you’ll offer a contest on your website to attract visitors.

Of course before offering a contest the first thing you need to be sure of is that it’s legal in your province or state. There are many legalities relating to contests so make sure you understand and are playing by the rules.

Contests are a terrific way to attract new visitors to your site, build goodwill with new and existing customers, and to also get people interested in your site. Especially if you are run a contest continuously. People will return to enter again and again.

The prize isn’t nearly as important as the thrill of the win but of course if you’re giving away an IPod you’ll likely draw a lot more traffic. Drawing traffic is good but you don’t just want to draw traffic to enter the contest so make sure your giveaway is related to your site. That way you’ll attract potential customers and not just visitors.

When you set up your contest you need to make sure that your contest rules are very easy to understand. Requiring members to register in order to enter is a good way to track your traffic rather than just letting anyone enter. If you are running your contest on a forum or board you might require entrants to make a specific number of posts in order to earn an entry form. If you are running it on a merchandise site you might require them to make a purchase or sign up, or any number of ways to qualify.

You should also be very clear about what the prize being offered is. You need to list what the restrictions are relating to the laws of the province or state you operate under. You also must say when the contest begins and the date the contest ends. Once you’ve chosen a winner you need to publish the winners name on your site and of course contact the winner via e-mail.

When you are running a contest it’s a good idea to have enough hype and advertising to attract visitors and new members. Be sure you post the information at as many sites as you can. Start threads on appropriate forums announcing your contest and of course promote it on your site too!

Sometimes running contests in groups works well. So for example you could have a weekly draw and then have all your weekly winners entered into a bigger monthly draw. Play around and see what works best for your site.

You should also limit how many times one individual can win. That way it ensures your contest doesn’t get abused and people are more likely to enter if they see that the same person can’t win over and over. The more winners the more traffic you are likely to generate.

Make sure you not only post your contest were ever you can, but that you also post your winners so that potential visitors see that there are winners on the site. Again it encourages them to enter.

You can use your contest to build a list of potential customer names for future mailings. Many sites do this. However also consider running a no strings attached contest as this encourages a lot more people to enter and the long term results tend to be much better.

People love contests and they love to win so why not consider running a contest on your website to increase traffic?

Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.