Before you hold or enter a contest, it is good to look at some “best practices” for contests. There are so many contests in the blogosphere these days. But what sets some contests apart from others?

People are generally lazy and if you have a contest with too many compulsory actions, it naturally will put off some people. So it is generally a good rule to have the entry requirements as simple as possible. If you would like to have many different options to enter the contest, make them optional. This way, you’ll most likely get better participation.

Nowadays, contest holders like to get many sponsors to sponsor their contest. This may be a win-win solution for the contest holders and the sponsors but not necessarily for the participants. We’ve heard of “after-sales service” in business. Well, I’d like to coin the term “after-contest service”. When you have contests with many sponsors, it is a good practice to follow-up with all the sponsors after the contest ends so that everyone gets their prizes. It may not be good enough to ask the participants to “contact the sponsors themselves”. Hence, if you have 50 sponsors in your contest, you should check with each one of them that they have given out the prizes as promised. This requires a bit of work but that is something which comes with the move to get so many sponsors.

The moral of the story is always to have the participants in mind when you hold a contest!

So do keep on visiting Contest Whiz Dot Com, you blog contest expert!