To answer your question - I didn’t say that blog contests don’t bring traffic to the site, I just pointed out that it’s not the best and easiest way to increase the blog’s readership and RSS feed count. I was getting about 300-350 visits per day in average before running the contests and I’m still getting approximately the same number of visits after the contests. On certain days during the contest the number of visits were reaching 400, and only once did it cross the 700 mark.

As for my anti-spam question - I guess I better come up with another “trick” question for you all

j/k.

Nice summary of the contest lessons, Vivien. I was simply picking winners randomly, not making them do anything extra. It helped a bit, and it hurt a bit also.

Now, regarding your points:

1 : That is a good example of how to use a contest to both reward people and measure the success of your own site. I should try something similar next time.

2 : This is a very good example that involves readers and allowing them to basically, and indirectly, run a contest themselves by allowing them to choose a prize.

One thing that can be done is to accept several prizes and then if one of the people who suggested some prize wins, allowing them to get the prize they wanted. Otherwise, you can award other people, people who did not suggest a prize, the prize you yourself had in mine.

3 : Rewarding the top commentors is a good thing. One of the reasons I didn’t do it is because I thought some people were too busy to comment everyday. Also, sometimes, such contest result in someone simply commenting a lot, not adding anything useful to a blog and after they win the contest, they simply disappear. I should have set some prize for the top commentors also, like you did, since there was more than 1 contest during the week. The rules you mentioned are really good, and I might use them in some form in the future if you don’t mind.

4 : I agree with your logic. However, sometimes bloggers themselves can be lazy or something, telling themselves “Nice, I will work on this a bit later, a bit later, a bit later” until it is too late. That’s what happened to me, I think.

5 : That is great. Ronald probably knows how to threaten people to subscribe to RSS feeds “or else.”

6 : This is a very important rule. A contest that is a month long may have its participants lose interest after a week unless the prize is something that is extremely huge, like a car.

I set the time frame for people to get back to me, if they won a contest/giveaway, to 24 hours. Later, I changed it to accommodate people who were not checking their e-mail regularly. That confused me a bit, though things worked out in the end.

7 : This should be one of the most important parts of a contest. I think contests should be used to know people more, and thus interact with people more also.

8 : This is another good point that I was thinking of while in the middle of the contest. I was changing a few rules, like setting different time limits to allow people to get back to me, and it turned out fine. Maybe next time I have to setup some rules that can be more accommodating to change.

Nice list! My first question is this: in your view, what is a good way to promote reader appreciation by telling readers one is not using them “simply” to gain more traffic, while gaining traffic at the same time?

Off-topic: isn’t the Earth a bit more spherical than round? It would be fun if the Earth was a square.

Also, Reader Appreciation Disco [RAD] sounds awesome! I have to find more disco songs to play for my audience next time.

Nice to have you back. I have missed my Ibit fix.

Oops, I forgot the anti spam comment.

Thanks, Shankar, I tried

Ronald, I’m sure you know very well what D in RAD stands for Thanks for considering to adjust the rules for the next year’s contests.

Andrew, I’m glad that you too thought it’s a good idea to have different rules for the contest. However it does require lots of time and thinking from the blogger to come up with those rules. So it’s really nice to see that these efforts have been appreciated
And yes, I completely agree with you regarding the Top Commenter’s contest.