And The Winner Of the FREE iPod Speaker System Is

Well it looks like my recent contest wasn’t at all what I thought it would be and was not very successful in pulling in traffic. People don’t seem to like to be given free product. To me that is weird. I understand that perhaps when I first posted about the contest I went about it the wrong way.

My conclusion is people are lazy! Like Stephen mentioned, I perhaps should have looked at how to do track/ping backs like WordPress and other blog scripts offer but I was unsure as to go about coding it up so that it would work. It has to do with the XML-RPC library and having my site respond to other people’s sites saying ‘Yes I link to you, this is the post I link with’ etc. Oh well.

In the second week of running the contest I changed the rules a bit and just asked for people to leave a comment with a valid email address so that if they were they randomly selected winner I could get in touch with them. I thought perhaps that might entice more people to leave a comment but I suppose I was wrong on that too.

Did I really promote the contest? If I think about it, I am sure I could have promoted it a bit better. I don’t get crazy traffic like other blogs do but 164 views to the original post alone. That is about 164 people that could have left a comment and had a chance to win a Free bonyq Sabre iPod Speaker System. I could of mentioned it on forums that offer a section for off-topic discussion, I could of left comments on other people’s blogs (though I tend to find that out of blogging etiquette and a bit spammy if the comment left for the contest in another blog is off topic). On many forums in which I am a member of, a part of my signature has either a text link to my blog or my PHP Dynamically created image that shows the 4 most recent posts which the contest was one of them.

But without further ado, out of the 2 people who left comments and were qualified for winning the FREE boynq Sabre iPod Speaker System Rod Templeton (www.rodtempleton.net) was the winner!

Congratulations to Rod and a thank-you goes to those who posted comments or visited my blog in the past 2 weeks.

This does not discourage me in giving away other free gadgets. I will just have to make the contests easier to begin with. My RSS feed readers count went up of an average of 5 people per day, which I find is nice to see.