Organizing a competition on your blog is always mentioned as a good way to get your visitors love you more. When Problogger’s Darren Rowse writes a post about creating an active community, competitions won’t go unmentioned. But to organize one is a pain. You’ll have to make up all the procedures and logistics yourself. Not the kind of thing a busy blogger is waiting for. That didn’t go unnoticed by Crystalroot’s Savraj, Kalid, and Lee, who founded the service ContestMachine.
This Y Combinator backed start-up let’s you create a competition widget which you can easily place on your site. There’s your competition! You can specify the prize (of course), what users have to do (answer a question, poll, or just enter their name), customize the design, the deadline, and collect some user data for email news letters. Oh and do you want a random winner or pick the lucky one yourself? The service is free to try out when you organize two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month for ten contests or $90 a year for fifty contests.
It’s funny to see how a widget can make such a complicated thing as a competition really easy. I seriously expect this service to stir up the number of competitions on blogs. The little thing just arouses a feeling of “I have to organize a competition right now!”.
If you’re not a web publisher, you might wonder by this point what’s in it for you? Well, as I said before, you might see more competitions on your blog. But that’s just a wild guess. What’s more concrete, is ContestMachine’s live page. You can check all the running competitions in their network. So if you’re bored for a minute, start winning some prizes!
By the way, we’ll organize another competition this week with Adobe. Stay tuned to see the ContestMachine widget popping up.
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