To help celebrate the 3-year anniversary of Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net blog, I sponsored a $333.33 cash prize in his $54,000 Birthday Bash contest – To date, this is my largest “marketing” expenditure, and I think I’m going to write this one off as a mistake.
Darren (actually, Lara Kulpa) posted this portion of the contest of Friday, one of dozens of prize giveaways with a total value of $54,000. To win one of the cash prizes in this part of the contest readers simply had to post a comment finishing the statement “If I had a million dollars“, and at last check over 740 comments had been posted. Congratulations to the lucky winner of my $333.33 prize, Adam of Pomomusing.com !
When I decided to help Darren with his contest by offering a cash prize, my goal was to get a little name-recognition and maybe a little bit of traffic. Problogger.net is probably the biggest “how to make money blogging” blogs on the internet and I thought this would be a sure-fire way to get the GrownUpGeek name in front of tens of thousands (if not more) eyeballs. The reason I’m calling this a mistake is because the contest was so big, that my prize was just a small fish in a very, very large pond. With approximately 3 contest posts per day for the last several days, and probably more for the next week or more, my prize came and went faster than a fart in a whirlwind. Total traffic generated: 4 visits
I don’t blame Darren for my mistake, I think I just jumped-in too quick and expected too much. At least I got a strong link out of it.
Damn shame, thats alot of money to spend for only 4 visitors, considering you got one from the person that won, the other 3 were from regular readers…. Thats tough,
Mubin said:
Yah, and i think another one was me..
Oh, well.. Just another expensive lesson-learned..
Well, call it a mistake if you like, but it was an investment in your marketing education. I experienced the same thing when I submitted posts to Darren’s recent 30 day become a better blogger series. Sure, I got referrals, but there were so many other articles it was hardly like I was featured.
BUT, on the other hand, you have an ongoing link to Darren’s website that will continue to generate traffic. I still get many hits a day from my submissions to darrens blog last month.
thanks for your prize. I’m sorry it didn’t convert as well as you were expecting. We learned a lot from it too and next time will do things differently too
You’ll get another link from the whole thing in the next day too – hopefully that and the previous ones will make it a little more worth your while!
I guess sometimes you need to find these things out the hard way. I donated $50 to JohnChow’s latest competition and I got over 60 visitors from it so far.