Guide on running Forum Contests

Irrespective of whatever type of site you have, or however old it is; one of things that you as a webmaster would always look forward to is getting new members, promoting your board and keeping a captive member-base.

One of the best ways of doing this is organizing community contests. Community contests are a great way to achieve a lot of good things and can benefit all type of sites:

• New Site: Its is a sure shot way of promoting your board. People are inherently attracted towards something that they will get for free or with minimal effort.
• Old but Active Site: Its a great way of keeping your existing members of board involved and have a "feel good" effect on your board. Plus you also ensure that some other competitor is not able to steal your member-base by aggressive marketing.
• Old but non-active site: A lot of sites start big, get members and then slowly lose them.(or in some cases keep getting members but they don't return) There can be a variety of reasons for this and while in such cases its also important to take hard look at what you have on offer on your board and maybe invest a bit more of time(and money if needed!) on making your board look better and snappier with better content, the surest way of getting your already registered members to come back with a bang is a contest that will compel them to come, post and see the changes(and hopefully the changes that you have done, will please them and they will start being active)

Now that you know how good contests can be for your board, we come to the difficult part. Thinking of having a contest is one thing, but actually benefiting from them is quite another. For long i have seen(from my own experiences of running 4 totally unrelated community sites and being a active member on hundreds of others) that if not properly implemented and tracked, a contest will turn out to be a complete waste of time and money. Remember, a good contest requires

• Watching trends and people behavior on your forums (and on competing forums too!) Find out what they like, what would interest them and what can you offer them as prize.
• A clear understanding of what your aims are and what you want to achieve with the contest. Different contests achieve different results. A contest suitable for brand building might not be a good one for getting new members(more about it later)
• A regular tracking and monitoring of the contest once it starts and then at the end of the contest also.

Now that we know what has to be done, lets get down to the details about how to do it. For purpose of segregation, i have chosen to divide the contests into 2 broad categories. Hard Prize Contest and Soft Prize Contest. The categorization is neither rigid nor authoritative and is certainly pretty unique(no wonder about that, i just invented them )