Advantages of Forum Contests
Forum contests are a great way to grab the attention of your forum members and viewers, as well as to incite new members to join. Forum contests can range in variety from posting competition to referral competition, and even more fun ones like photo competition when your forum is popular.
When first creating your forum, if you want to boost start it with posts, your best option is to have a posting contest, but don’t advertise it just on your forum, remember your forum is still new. Try going on various other webmaster forums like Digital Point, Site Point, Name Pros, and etc. These forums usually have quality posters who post for money or enter competitions to win the grand prize.
Set a realistic date, the usual contest length is 1 month, if you set a finishing date too far away, no one will enter, or people will just start posting near the end of the contest.
Have other prizes, like for second and third place, best quality poster, and etc.
After you get a lot of members in the forum, whether they are real or paid or joined for the previous contest, create a referral contest on your forum (it helps to post it on other forums like previously mentioned) so the person with the most referrals will win and also have second and third prizes. The contest should last 1 month and you make sure that no one uses their IP to create more members.
If you have finally reached success and your forum is popular with members and a steady amount of posts, you can have some fun contests like arcade contest, photo contest, create a logo contest, and etc. Sometimes forums will do this to get more members to join at a young age but it is unusual.
When creating a contest, make sure you post what form of payment method you will use, for cash prizes the majority of people like PayPal, however some people will accept: bank wire, Western Union, MoneyBookers, E-Gold, and various other smaller e-currencies.
Referring back to the referral contest, you should make sure you have referral turned on for the registration method so people can say who referred them and they should have to make X amount of posts, usually 10 or 15 posts, to be considered an official referral.
Contests are used a lot instead of paid posters because they are usually the cheaper method. If you award a total of $200 in prizes for a 1 month contest and get 4, 000 posts, which are equal to 5 cents per post, which is really cheap content as forum posters go for up to 30 cents a post.
Contests are usually just a secondary form of advertising to help get a few extra posts on your forum, but paid posters are the best way to go so try not to exclude that method from how you create your forum, but don’t pay people per post as well if they are participating in the posting contest.
However, not all forums are right for contests, just look at your forum type and decide if it is right or not. Webmaster forums are great for it but a forum about exotic pets may not be so great.
