How Not To Hold A Blog Contest

Please see this post from A Blog About Nothing for something I totally missed before and my apology in the comments. Much of what is below has been somewhat invalidated, however it is still good advice for holding a contest. Pick a random winner whenever you can and be very clear on how to enter the contest and how it will be judged.

A while back I entered a competition to describe what I would do if I had $50 to spend on my blog. I wrote this post for a competition on A Blog About Nothing and the winner was chosen recently. If you read through the comments from the post announcing the winner you will find some interesting responses. In particular, Beth from afrogtokiss.net summed things up rather well:

A bit offensive? Really offensive. We took the time to write a post giving you a backlinks and you 1. don’t thank us and 2. Insult those of us who entered.

There are a few things that one can learn on how not to hold a blog contest by using this contest as an example.

Here is the first lesson when running a blog contest: pick a random winner. If that is not the way you wish to hold the contest, then be very clear exactly how you will pick the winner...up front. Had I known that the intent was to come up with the most original way of spending $50 on my blog I certainly would have composed a different post for the contest. Instead:

Zybron - This was a pretty common entry/comment for this contest. Buy a domain name and move to a real self-host Word Press solution. Again not original

Well, next time that I am aware that I'm looking for something 'original' I'll be happy to post an original idea. Instead, you asked what I would do if I had $50 to spend on my blog. I was truthful. I would spend the money improving my blog like I described.

Second lesson - announce exactly what you are looking for in your contest. Since part of the criteria of judging in this contest was originality and it wasn't announced before-hand, many of the contestants were upset with the manner in which it was judged. I'm sure, had the originality factor been present from the first day of the contest, no one would have been upset for being critiqued on their choice of how to spend the money.

It's important to realize before hand that people can become quite upset over something like this and it could impact your blog negatively. Personally, I'm pretty happy that I was only tagged with being unoriginal. He was fairly scathing to some of the other participants.