Contests and polls are great ways to add that crucial "stickiness" to your blog - to get your readers to return, stay, and interact.

Polls are simple. Find a creative or controversial question, with good answers, and put it up. Democracy is a good Wordpress plugin for that, with the downside that it is not ‘within’ posts, only on the sidebar.

Contests can be tricky. Too complicated and people will defer to being lazy. I have found that the prize is only part of the factor in the success of contests. The entry has to be easy, requiring something interesting of the user, or somthing simple such as sending in an email address. You need to be aware of your target: age, time constraints, knowledge, resources.

I think audience is a larger factor in the number of entries than the prize itself. For example:

When I worked in advertising, we ran a campaign for retailers to win large screen televisions. But to enter they had to encourage their customers to enter with their specific code (predefined by tickets given) and thus needed to put up the sales materials. Too much work. There were entries, but fewer than we’d like. I’ve seen a similar result in the blogosphere.

I recently ran a contest on my Hilary Duff blog. The prize was intangible: ‘fan of the month’, but the entry was appropriate to the audience. They had to dress up a doll using a special website - very little skill required for the younger audience, but also fun. It had a very large number of entries.

So I have found that the match between contest and audience is absolutely crucial. If your contest is fun and easy, you should have a good time.

Combining polls with contests: If you can combine polling with contests, you have a bonus. I decided to take the best entries on my Hilary contest and post them to be ‘voted on’ using a poll - each entry was anonymous and Democracy prevents voting more than once per IP. In under a week, I had a couple of hundred votes. Overall, it was really fun for me and for my readers. They were very excited by it, and for me it created a new way to interact with them: announcing the contest, announcing the voting, announcing the winner, placing the winner as fan of the month. Lots of content.

If you have an audience that is very sticky on your blog already, they will take to the above approach. I think the more your audience enjoys being on your blog, the more they will enjoy contests. Start with lots of polls to gain the stickiness, then increase over time.

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