My former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Brian "Dr. Frankensite" Alvey, host of the very cool "Meet the Makers" web building workshop series, just launched a new project called Blogstakes. It's a sort of sweepstakes that rewards blogs that link to it by giving them the same prizes that the people they referred win ( = if you win a Hawaiian vacation on Blogstakes, so does the blog that referred you). I'll let Brian explain:
A friend of a friend was asking me for ways to promote his product that were better than begging top bloggers for links in exchange for samples. I took more than a week to respond since I didn't have any answers. Then I told him he should do a contest and give out prizes to the randomly-chosen winners AND the blogs that sent them. The more I explained about it technically (how it should track 'referer strings' rather than force blogs to sign up for affiliate tracking URLs and how that means everyone can just use the same link to the contest), he explained that it was beyond him to build.
So I built it. It was quietly launched yesterday afternoon and already this morning I've had a bunch of requests from people who want to either interview me about it or have things that they want to give away (or both). Many of them have been people with blog-related software that they want me to promote. I did a lot of testing of the concept and the execution to make sure it conveys the message that I'm just a guy who builds Web sites, not a Raging Cow marketing outsider who is here to rip you off and the feedback was great. People were worried that they were going to refer thousands of people to my site and I was going to steal their email addresses and my sponsors were going to spam them endlessly. They're not, because they never get to see individual data on anyone except the winners. So the privacy policy is really simple and in-your-face. We hate spam too.
Another person was concerned about having to link to contests that they didn't want to win. The easy answer is: link to contests you want to win and don't link to ones you don't want to win. And already some people are adding this to their non-content column — in fixture positions just like their Blogrolling lists and Blogshares icons. That was without prompting. They just saw that as how these contests will fit into their blogs. That was really cool to see. In many ways it's a social experiment. I've been asked why the contests last 4 weeks and 6 weeks. "Won't they have a ton of interest in the first week and then die off?" Who knows? I'm going to find out.
