Competitions and promoting your board

[Noodles]

Has anyone had any luck with running competitions on their forums to help increase member signup and activity?

I'm thinking of doing a monthly draw where anyone with over 5 posts is eligible, but I'm worried about people signing up just to spam 5 posts and enter the draw.

[Orcas]

Perhaps you could run a referall contest of sorts?

[briansol]

i ran a few and they all failed miserably and cost me out of pocket.

[woostar]

We have photo comps and pub quizzes in the chatroom all the time. Had 46 enter our last live chatroom quiz, but it has never improved signup numbers.

[ct2k7]

I've still got a referral competiton running from February that was meant to end in March... :(

[jbartle]

i ran a few and they all failed miserably and cost me out of pocket.

Yeah, same here. One recent one I had a video contest giving away 300 dollars in prizes to see if that would entice people to sign up and join but that wasn't the case. Then I only had about 10 entries...I was extremely pissed.

I don't know if I would do something with post counts but that's up to you bro. I don't think I'll be doing any more contests for my sites in the near future unless I can figure out a win-win situation b/c right now it's win-lose (and I lose lol).

[snakeair]

I used to run a referral contest when i first started my forum to keep the member's active. The winner would recieve a banner or text link on my forum's footer for a month. One thing i had to check monthly was the new registrations and make sure no one cheated registering more then once.

Any contest you run, there will be always at least one person trying to out smart you to win it. Make sure you enforce the contest rules.

[Mr Morningstarr*]

I have a monthly prize draw running on my site, which is open to absolutely everyone. You don't need to be a member to enter but since starting it new memberships have risen. People obviously think they'll be in with a better chance if they're members.

I also have a monthly draw for a £10 Amazon voucher for all "active" members with a post count over 100. To be honest I think it has little or no effect whatsoever. I view it as a gift to my valued members.

What I did find quite useful were caption competitions. They're open to members only, so you get sign-ups, and they encourage posting and participation in the voting.

Really I find competitions are best for creating traffic, not really ideal for getting active members. But you can't fault increased traffic, and the more traffic you get the more chance of new members, right?

[yeknom]

be careful about the spam stuff.. btw wich is ur forum¿?

[Mr Morningstarr*]

What spam stuff?

My forum is in those three links I posted, just click on one and you can enter our competition to win some Mezcal.