I just got an email from a large website, they have over 750,000 users..they emailed a competition last week to all of their users to share their experiences and they had…less than 24 entries. It seems December is not the month to run competitions..

Firstly, the competition was great and big thanks to all involved.

Why was it not as much of a success?

Well I have broken it down in two parts:-

Should we (FMB) have been more active promoting it?

Well, firstly, including the great post by Fracas, there were 4 or 5 posts on our blog, we also emailed the entire fuelmyblog subscriber base of over 8,000 to inform them of the competition, only once mind you as we don’t like to keep doing as is a bit spammy! I also spent a day scouring the internet plucking out entries as people didn’t all leave comments! I suspect I missed quite a few. So I wrote a post about linking to help people! And another about leaving comments in votes to get more votes. I went on twitter and told my 300′ish followers to take a look, stumbled upon it and dugg it. We also left comments in our votes but in fairness we have to got to look a tad less pushy!

Why the lack of entries? (how I see it and only my initial off the top of my head thoughts!)

1. Too close to Christmas, too many people are still emailing me to say they had no time to enter. Maybe in hindsight a New Year comp would have been better?

2. We should have been clearer about how to get votes and how long it lasted however the dates were all stated on the competition page maybe we needed to highlight that part further?

3. Too complicated? Maybe trying to weave in all of the sponsors was overkill, I think writing about the prize you want to win would be simpler for the future?

4. Sponsors maybe should have left comments thanking the entries, something I will insist in the future, I think it shows they are real.

5. Less prizes? Maybe one prize per week would work better?

6. Everyone hates us? Could be that you know

At the end of the day, there were entries and all really great, I don’t know what else we could have done apart from talk in the forum.

We just tried to give away $300 of Microsoft software and had 5 entries that we can find…again, not really a good time of the year, the site is as busy as ever in terms of hits but people are blogging less right now as it is the most offline month of the year.

Our biggest ever comp response was when we did a survey that took over 10 mins to complete and the prize was an ipod Nano, we had over 450 responses and the sponsor got absolutely nothing but information out of it, no links nor coverage!

If I had the answers I’d be rich!

Back to cleaning the chimneys this winter for me!

So, he’s out there tracking down the people who’ve entered by writing something on their blog, but not finished entering properly by creating a proper link back to the fuelmyblog post or leaving a comment.

That Kevin. He’s such a good egg!

And now since I’ve said that, I need to create a link so he finds this and gets a warm fuzzy!