NEW! Want help picking a Facebook contest or sweepstakes app? Here’s a tool to show you which apps will work for you:
Winner picked at random or by skill?
In addition to “Like-ing” your Fan Page, do you want…
Photos entries?
Video entries?
Plain ol’ text entries?
Original Article:
With more than 15,000 people a year coming to this blog just for Facebook contest apps, I went digging to find some been-there-done-that apps you can count on. I’ve also had some very smart software developers post comments and email me about Facebook sweepstakes and contest apps they’re creating.
Hopefully this roundup will at least let you cut down your research time…
NEW! Want help picking a Facebook contest or sweepstakes app? Here’s a tool to show you which apps will work for you.
Hey everyone,
Good news!
Looks like Facebook decided to drop their crazy pre-approval requirement for contests. Ya know, the one where they wouldn’t even talk to you if you had less than $10,000 (or more!) to spend. I talked about this here.
Now check out Facebook’s simplified Promotions Guidelines here.
MUCH better, no?
Just make sure to skim the “You can”s and “You cannot”s at the bottom.
As before, they include not automatically entering someone just for Liking your Fan Page, not notifying winners through Facebook or incentivizing posting anywhere on Facebook except your Fan Page. But note they did tweak some of the wording in the other statements to make them broader.
Ever heard that before? You have if you’ve ever worked on a product launch.
“JV” stands for “Joint Venture (partner),” which is often just an affiliate with more trust and a fatter email list than others in your affiliate army. If your stuff’s good and you come across as one of the good guys (or gals), you might just wrangle a mailing.
It’s worth the effort too. After all, if somebody volunteered to do all the legwork to sell $10 of product and give you $5, would you take that deal? I would! 24/7.
Lucky for launches, the numbers are WAY bigger than $10. The big guys routinely do $1,000,000+, with some now pulling in $3,000,000+ for a single launch. Most people don’t make that much in their entire lives!
Ever wished you could run a viral social media contest right from your blog?
Well, then ContestBurner may just be for you.
It’s a WordPress plugin created by ultra-smart marketer, Bill McIntosh, letting you assign points for various actions people take to spread the word.
Of course, that’s been a good idea all along, but it’s also been equally hard to track anything people do in social media. You’ve had to track the final results flowing back to you as email opt-ins, purchases or whatever your contest objective was.
They’re great because I can listen to hours of them–equivalent to reading 100s of pages–as I’m walking around the house, cleaning, throwing together a meal in the kitchen, or even jumping up and down on my rebounder for exercise.
It’s been GREAT.
I listened to 20+ hours in just the last few days, which shows me pretty clearly how much time I spend just doing “stuff” I didn’t think was a big deal before. So I’ve obviously got room for improvement in how I invest my time, but I remembered something else too…
Hardly anyone takes action on books.
Hardly a revelation either, right? You’ve probably heard the abysmal stats on how few people ever make it past the first chapter of any book. Even fewer pick up the book in the first place. If you’ve ever walked into a library and seen the shelves chock full of books, you know what books do most of the time: gather dust.
It’s pretty sad, considering the 1,000s of years of wisdom so carefully captured in all those books. Yet most of us are pathetically ignorant (I’m guilty too!) of not tapping into it nearly as much of it as we could.
That said, I’m NOT suggesting we go collecting the countless books ever written on a subject. But how much of the info in any given book have we put into practice?
Up until now, reading has been a pretty passive experience unless we took good notes, translated them into action steps and did something about them. I propose a new paradigm, seeing each book as a ticket to 2 things:
I think we all have at some point. And I think I’m guilty of asking it a bunch more times than I’ve answered it. (I promise to answer it in this post for you.)
It feels sadly cliché to even ask. What is this passion thing anyway?
The more people throw around the word, the more of a fairytale elixir it seems to be–like the Fountain of Youth Ponce de Leon spent so many years riding the high seas in a rickety wooden ship to find in the 1500s.
But it doesn’t demand risking life and limb to find. After all, passion is nothing more than excitement.
It’s what juices you enough to read how-to e-books until 2AM on a Friday night.
It’s what impels you to pull out your planner every weekend, so you squeeze every last drop from your week ahead.
It’s what tugs at you to blog until you’re blue, gushing your enthusiasm when you’ve barely got any readership yet.
Even if it’s not these things, you know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Heck, it’s why you’re reading this right now, is it not?
Whew, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I’m super sorry for it, but I’ve got something to make it up to you…
I’ve been working away behind the scenes on a free-but-meaty list giveaway called the Contest Crafting Crash Course. You’ll get Lesson 1 within a day of opting in, and then another lesson every couple of days for a couple of weeks. It’s my gift to you, for all the good questions I get about how to craft your own contests to “Amp Attention, Build Buzz and Convert Connection into Ca$h.”
But that’s not all…
I also learned several great lessons on contest advertising on a contest I recently helped a friend with. Here they are with all the blood, sweat and tears filtered out:
One of the best ways to get a new product to go big is to run an awesome launch affiliate contest on the backend.
For example, in the affiliate contest Don Crowther ran for his Social Profit Formula launch back in July, he was giving away a Tesla Roadster or $100,000 in cash to the grand prize winner. Not only that, but there were 30 total prizes up for grabs with the minimum prize being an iPad 64GB worth $100s. Pretty cool, huh?
Look closer though…
20 out of those 30 prizes–including the Tesla–required topping $2,000,000 in sales to have any chance at them. The top 10 prizes required vaulting the $3,000,000 mark. You’re in pretty vaunted company if you can sell that much on any launch–even though the ~$2,000 price tag meant selling “only” 1,000 units to get there.
Now let’s do the simple math for the product launcher…
Lately, I’ve been working on a contest idea to do market research.
You see, I’m helping a good marketing agency owner friend plan for a major JV product launch early next year. He’s serving up a hot new social media training product that’s been baking for the last few months.
Yet there are 2 problems…
He doesn’t currently have a targeted list. He’s got a modest one for his agency, but nothing in the realm he’d want for a major product launch.
That makes it hard to do surveys to gauge what people are most likely to buy. (He’s ingeniously paid people to take surveys on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but that’s nowhere near as targeted as one’s own list.)
What’s a hard-workin’ Internet marketer gotta do to make an online contest legal?
Well, it depends…
To get a handle on it, let’s first list the 3 elements that make for “gambling”:
Prize - something of tangible value participants can win
Chance – Any element of randomness in selecting the winner(s) (i.e., any selection process not 100% based on skill or hard logic)
Consideration - Something of tangible value participants must pay (often money, but it can also be effort if there’s a lengthy task–like a long survey–required to enter)
Ever wished you could run a viral social media contest right from your blog?
