Contest Outreach Strategy

[ivankrm]

Hello Mozzers,

I've just started a contest in my own SEO blog, in which people will receive a full website audit, a keyword research plus competitive analysis, and an on-site audit.

What I want from it is two things:

1. Get a few testimonials for my upcoming SEO consulting services;
2. Get more FB fans.

As I know that my blog won't get too many tweets and shares per se, I have to manually outreach bloggers so they may tweet about my contest.

What I've been doing up until now is saying:

"Hey, my name is Ivan, I've got this blog and I'm running this contest. The prizes are these ones. I know your Twitter audience may be interested in this, so, could you tweet this? Thanks".

In the email I already give them a tweet with the URL and everyhing, so they don't have to do anything, but copy and pasting.

What're your opinion on this strategy? Do you recommend doing something else, like a more indirect approach, to contest outreach?

Thank you very much!
Ivan

[crackingmedia]

Hi Ivan

You say "what I have been doing up to now..." which suggests you have already been doing this. What success have you seen on bloggers being willing to tweet to their followers your offer? If you have already offered this to quite a few bloggers, then you should already have some indication on (a) the percentages of bloggers who are willing to tweet for you and (b) the take up rate from their tweets.

I would be interested to hear if it is proving successful for you.

My strategy if wanting to offer these free audits is to build a list of contacts myself through my own outreach in social media. It's not a quick strategy but something you need to build and grow over time. Go on to the social media channels and engage with people, listen and try to answer their questions, share with your own followers any good things they are sharing. Then, as people build up more trust and authority in the places you are engaging people will begin to respond to you more and be more willing to share the good things you put out.

I hope that helps,
Peter

[ivankrm]

Peter,

Thanks for your answer.

To clarify, when I say "what I have been doing up to now..." I mean one day lol. I've just started doing this, I've no experience with contest creation.

Well, in fact, I've just got one reply of one prospect, so from the 10 emails sent, I've got 1 answer. That's a 10% effectiveness. I'm thinking on sending around 30 emails, so we'll see in a few days.

I hope to get a 20-40% success rate, just because I'm trying to get one tweet. We'll see in a few days.

About what you say, it's true that what matters is having a nice social following. But that takes a lot of time. Imagine that if I take a client (not this case), and they don't have too many followers, it's the same situation that I've got. Even if my client had lots of followers-fans, if they don't have good engagement rates (what Avinash Kaushik calls applause rate, amplification rate and conversation rate), then that doesn't matter at all.

Anyways, thanks for your answer!

[Chris.Menke]

Ivan,

I'd say that one audience that is likely  to respond favorably to your contest would be small companies with new websites.  Such an audience is most concentrated around lower-end and new web designers who are willing to make relatively inexpensive websites for clients in order to establish a client base.

Those types web designers are rarely at the top of the search results for "web designer [your city]"-type searches because their domains aren't established enough to rank highly.  That means that if you do a search like that, you're like to find those rising-star web designers down past page two or three (along with the falling-stars who have had their time in the sun and have dropped out of page-one due to unsustainable SEO tactics--there are a lot more of those than there used to be).  If you contact those low-ranking web designers with your contest, they may be happy to to ask their clients to tweet something to you in order for a chance to win.

[katemorris]

I would worry less about what your communication to them says and more about identifying the market. To get a 20-40% return on who you contact, you're going to have to put in some major work into who these site owners are and if they want or need help. This isn't a numbers game, it's a market identification game.

If it were me, I'd spend time on a few web design and website development forums looking for people who are asking questions about their site or have concerns, and then develop conversations with them. Step away from this being about you and make it about them.

Hope that helps!