How I Conceptualized and Marketed The Techie Buzz Contest

26 May 2009

Blog contests these days are pretty common these days, and I had a plan in mind to do something similar for the 3rd birthday bash of Techie Buzz, my tech blog which is pretty popular.

However there were several things I wanted to and did not want to do with the competition.

I wanted it to be successful and well participated.
I wanted to give away something useful to the readers, something that they would really want to use.
I did not want it to be a run of the mill competition, I wanted it to be something big and unique.

So I sat down and planned everything 3 months in advance as to what format I would use, how I would promote it and where I would get sponsors from, mind you everything took me a lot of time to finalize.

The Nitty Gritties

Once I had a proper plan in place, I started contacting the software vendors and others who I had felt would add value to the competition, I did not contact an awful lot of people, however I did contact few of whom I had already known and quite a few whom I was dealing with for the first time in my life.

I had to market the contest well enough for them to actually sponsor the competition, agreed Techie Buzz is popular a bit, but the main thing I needed to convince the sponsors was what value I would have given back to them for their sponsorship.

100s of emails later and lots of PR and marketing later, I had a final list of sponsors who would give away some incredible prizes, including top notch software and hardware.

I soon went and announced the birthday bash and it was indeed well received by people, hopefully it should be one of the biggest competition in medium blog history

The total prizes now are well worth over $5000 now with addition of new sponsors, however I had to draw a limit and stop accepting sponsors as I didn’t want to drag the competitions on for ever.

Running The Competitions

I have run 4 competitions now in the Birthday bash and they have been well received and satisfactory as of now, I choose twitter as a medium to promote the competitions, because it is really fast paced and can gain user attention fairly quickly, most of the users who have competed in the competitions have come through twitter.

Of course I could have asked readers to compulsorily only write blog posts to enter the competitions, and I believe that many would have participated, however that in turn would require a lot of users to spend some time and energy participating, with the amount of competitions planned that was not the right way to go about it.

Also leaving regular readers who could not twitter or blog out would have been a mistake, so I also gave the option for users to comment and win.

As for the logistics, it’s not really easy to do such a magnitude of competition alone, planning the bash, contacting the sponsors, planning individual giveaways, promoting them, choosing the winners and sending them the prizes is a tough job, and there are quite a few competitions left in the pipeline, at the end of it I will definitely be exhausted, but I already planned my break and will be going on a relaxing 4 day break on Cruise in New York waters

And Some Final Wise Words

There is nothing in this world you cannot achieve, no matter how small or big you are, here are few things that I would advice you to use in whatever you want to do.

Plan in advance – If you know you want to do something, plan in advance before you actually do it, it helps immensely to have plans in place, the outcome of your goals depends on how systematically your proceed towards achieving it.
Make a case and promote it – In my case, I had to reach out to others, some of whom I never knew before in my life, I had to make a case and promote it to them, and I had to make sure that it was strong enough for them to consider.
Don’t get dejected if you lose – While trying to promote the contest few of the bigger guys did not even respond back, however I never lost hope and continued talking to others who would add value.
Lay down everything clearly – At the introduction post of the bash, I made everything pretty clear, what the contest was about, what users would get and how they would get it, this in turn made the user know that what they could expect.
Work quickly and efficiently towards targets – From the competitions I have run, I announce the competition and rules and then after a couple of days I announce the winners and immediately distribute the prizes and promote the next contest, it’s quick and dealt with quickly and efficiently. If I would say, hey Ok now they have competed will announce winners later and send them prizes even later, this would complicate my whole workflow of the competition immensely, yes I have a workflow for it

There are several things I may have wanted to add, however don’t have anything right now on the top of my head, however hopefully this has been insightful enough for you, and hope you are still reading the last word .

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