$1000 Contest

[eXe_]

I've been considering the options to most effectively promote my board (http://www.alienhub.com/website) & I think this is a great way to go about it-

Offer $1000 to the member who makes most posts in 99 days, a bit more than 3 months. Getting the word out about this contest would be fairly easy and I think many people would be interested. While signing up all members would be warned that spamming or making irrelevant posts is not tolerated and anyone who makes 5 or more spam posts will be banned.

I'm going to go ahead with this after I update the media gallery (http://www.alienhub.com/media). Do you have any suggestions?

[TheDPQ]

I think for 1k you could run a few contests that would generate better results and less spam. 'Money for posts' contests usually end up with less loyal members, more spam, and fights about so and so posting spam to 'win'.

[Scott]

I'd tend to agree with TheDPQ on this one, $1000 is a lot for one contest, especially at the start of a forums life. Half of that could be used for advertising and, if used strategically, would more like bring in members who will stay after 3 months.

[eXe_]

Well what do you recommend then? $500? I figured $1000 would arouse more interest and competetion.

Do you have any specific tips on how to massively promote the board with about $1000 as a monthly promotional budget?

[TheDPQ]

I don't think you should spend any money on your contest idea. You want quality, not quantity. If you have more interesting posts then you need less users to keep things flowing. If someone just posts... the most useless sort of posts only to gain a better post count then people aren't going to come back if its a bunch of bullshit.

You want activity, not just posts. You need to promote a special sort of posts. Articles or analysis or funny stories i don't know. If you must focus on posts do as a reward. Give points out for interesting posts. The person with the most points win. (I hate posting for money contests bah).

I'd say even for something like that 500 is more then enough.

Get promotions banners set up so that users just interested in helping out can place them in their sigs on other forums (remember to have them be respectful of the forum's rules).

For the rest, you might try running some banners elsewhere for the rest of your budget. While you are waving money in people's faces to make interesting posts you could try and get new people to the board. Hopefully the combo of new posts and new people will spark some life into the board.

[eXe_]

Thanks TheDPQ, for the advice.

I'm still listening, so if you have an opion- post

[TheDPQ]

Have you had any experience advertising before? You may want to see what sort of options you have.

If you do banners, you might link to a landing page, with an overview on what your site does. Crappy Sample: http://forum.yaxay.com/extra.php?do=003

I've only done it twice, because advertising is generally done by the owner and i'm only the admin. But both times i did it i registered a new user and tracked the referals it got. Sort of a cheap and cheesy way of reporting but you can see who signed up because of the ad (assuming they did it right away) and if they are active posters or not.

[eXe_]

Yes, I've advertised before and I'm advertising right now. I was using adwords earlier. As of now, I have ads for Alien Hub (http://www.alienhub.com) running on metalstorm.ee, totse.com and cryptomundo.com

I have 5 banners that I use for promotion you can check them out at the website. I try to have banners that prompt the user to click, i.e they're catchy.

I think using a tracking link for signups is a good idea, I'll implement that asap.

[TheDPQ]

Have you tried signing up for google analytics? (Sometimes takes a bit) I know there is a VB hack that makes it easy to set up goals in the registration. You can see how well your adwords campaign is doing.

I wonder if you should tack on a hidden field for the users who come directly from a adwords keyword. I mean, how do you know if its working? To me part of the conversation would be getting them to register, but i know its really working if they are posting as well.

What do you use now to track conversions?

[eXe_]

I don't use anything at the moment, other than a "How did you hear about us" field. I think using cookies would be the way to go.

Regarding Adwords, targetting keywords like "Aliens" and "UFO" is really a waste of funds IMO, they hardly got 1 or 2 new members everyday. A particular keyword that I found paid off well was "Project Serpo (http://www.serpo.org)".

[TheDPQ]

Yah aliens and ufo would be too broad. What are some of your top natural search keywords?

Right, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to have your link you set in google have something like campaign=adwords. Anyone coming from that will get a cookie set. If and when they register it could save that info in a hidden profile field.

If you are spending money on advertising i would suggest getting some sort of analyzer that lets you see how well you did that day/week/month/ad campaign. After enough data you can figure out what brings in the most people with the best activity.

[writespeak]

Offer $1000 to the member who makes most posts in 99 days

If you're going to use that idea or a version of it, I suggest making it a draw instead for the top X posters or for everyone who posts over X posts during the time period. A problem with the above is that if one person is way out in the lead, most other people won't see any point in trying to compete.

Lois