How a strategy went wrong – Experience

This is the story of another failure. You know, sometimes, despite your attempts, some things don’t go the way we see it.

This is about the review competition that was opened this month on Daily dose. The competition was that if you write a review about this blog, you stand a chance to win a premium domain.

As you might have guessed, the purpose of the competition to get as many back links as possible.But unfortunately, this competition was an utter failure! Such a failure that it gave me no backlinks or reviews except one from Rishi Raj.Clearly this is not what i had expected.
I had expected at least a couple of reviews and links.

Well, soon after the competition was rolled out, the response was very cold. There were no comments or emails that enquired about the competition.Somebody suggested on the comments that i added a few bucks as the prize – in the comments which showed that the prize(domain) was clearly not one that many wanted.

Well, the competition is scheduled to end this month end, so I’m guessing that there wont be any entries further and the price as declared would be given to Rishi(who is the only reviewer.) Despite the fact that this was a failure, it taught me a lesson. What are the things that counts when opening a competiton like this.What eill grab readers attention and what will not.

I’d like to share my experience with you. Here goes-

Reason why i think this competition was a failure.

1- Zero motivation
The prize failed to attract readers. It was a premium domain name – bloggersense.com. I was under that impression that it’s a very sought after one. True may be, but since all the visitors had a domain name already, or had settled with their blogspot domain transfers, this was not at all attractive to them.

So in cases like this, it may be useful to have a little survey done on your readers to check what they look for in a competition and what prizes they would like to have.

2 – Wrong target
This prize should have been announced in a domain selling/related website.Where the target are people who are looking for domains.In this case the target already had their domain names – why should they look for another one? Again a clear case of wrong communication.

3 – Short time frame
Honestly, i think this is not a big factor, but there is a possibility that there would have been more entries, had the dead line was longer.

There are more reasons but these probably are the most important ones that fuelled the failure of this strategy.
Meanwhile, any ideas on what else would have been a better competition?

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