Free Prize / Competition strategy

We're toying with the idea of giving away one of our products in a competition. It's a high value product costing several hundred £'s/$'s with the idea that customers email in why they should win the prize.

Our idea is that it'll generate some good content to post on the site and if we create some interest about it in our field we can get some links to the competition and help boost our link popularity.

Wmy may loose a few sales through customers not wanting to buy in case they win - but there we go.

Anyone tried similar? Any recommendations on where to look to get links from others sites, etc. or any general tips would be appreciated.

I would be careful when it comes to contests; there are legal issues and certain jurisdictions have certain rules and regulations. Check with a lawyer to be sure you're in compliance with the law.

Any recommendations on where to look to get links from others sites

Generally speaking, you don't need to look to get links. If you do the proper promotion of the contest (i.e., press releases, asking bloggers to mention it in their blog, etc.) then people will naturally link to it.

We're running this competition now and in a single day have had 100 entries which we're deeming quite successful. Visits are up 150 compared with an average day for october.

Any tips on a good press release site to put this on?

Also any other good sites? It's already on the prize finder site.

Tim, I'm not sure where you are located (I'm thinking the UK), but I'll follow on bhartzer's advice with some of my own:

Make absolutely certain you have the following in place:

1 - contest guidelines - written in as much detail as possible about how folks enter, what the rpize will be, when they'll get it, what you plan to do with their content, their e-mail address - etc. In short, you must have the fine print in place.

2 - Make certain you have aprivacy policy up on the site detailing what you do with collected info, as a company, such as e-mail addy's. if you itnend on e-mailing them later to drive sales, say so - most folks won't read the page, but if you don't have it, and someone decides to come after you for spamming them, you're toast. ;(

Have you restricted entires to specific geographical areas? If not, you should research this. Quebec, in Canada, for example, is universally excluded form contests because their government requires final signoff on all contests 30 days or so before it goes live. And any contest with a prize purse larger than $5,000 USD MUST be registered with the states of Florida, New York and Rhose Island - and Florida and NY require bonds sent to them to hold in escrow matching the value of the prize purse.

There are a ton of small things to consider when running a promo or ocntest online. Your area may require, in legislation, that all contests be free to enter - so folks need, at least, a snail-mail addy to send in entries for the contest - and they have to be include din the drawing, too. Some contries strictly prohibit advertising contests which originate outside their jurisdiction - so if your site is visible to their citizens, and they see the contest page, you're in violation of their law.

In most cases, these things are never pursued. Most folks run contests "illegally" for years without issue...but man, wouldn't it suck if you got dinged legally...?

Talk to a lawyer training in this stuff.

Just so you know, this advice comes from running casino promotions for 6 years, and online contests for the past 5 years+. Our current contests have prize purses up to $100,000 USD...so I talk to the lawyers all the time - in fact, I run everything through a dedicated comapny in the US that handles all of it for us (for a fee). Not saying that everyone needs to go to this level of detail, but to be legal, it takes work and money...

Name of the company is SCA Promotions - great folks, trustworthy, and reliable.

Thank you very much for the long and useful reply! There are full t's and c's, a statement that it is only for the UK and clearly states the date and time and time zone for the closing date! To the best of our knowledge it meets all UK laws...it's actually our clients website who has accepted in writing that it is his responsibility.