Nowadays everyone and his auntie seem to be holding big and nasty contests, how do you think are they getting all their prizes? Well many of those guys will probably be actually having a prize to give away, but don’t you think that there are a lot of black sheep? Especially at the randomized contests where is no controlling instance? A contests is designed to increase traffic and readership. Do you need more than an empty box to make your contest a success?
Let’s play some mind-games
First of all, this is all about what could happen, it’s strongly advised that a contest is not designed like this and that you can actually give away something. Let’s just check what the spammers, scammers and bad people are up to nowadays.
Let’s just pretend that you want to run a contest, but don’t have anything to give away, but you actually have 3-4 blogs that are running and don’t have anything in common. For example a project about fine dining, one about cars and the other about whatever. On your marketing blog you decide to hold a contest but can’t afford to give away anything, what do you do now?
How people hold fake contests and piss others off
You could hold a regular contest where you pretend to give away something and draw random names, tell them they won and never ship the present. Pretty nasty if you ask me, but you will probably get double the publicity, because those guys will write about how they didn’t get their winnings. This is the stupid way to hold a fake contest. And believe me, when you browse the webs you will find occasional posts where people are angry that they didn’t win.
How to hold Ninja like fake contests – No One saw what happened
Then there is the way where no one gets hurt. Not literally and still this is nothing people are advised to do. It’s easy to imagine that when you are running a few blogs that are not connected to each other to simply run your contest on your main blog, most people have more than one blog when they try to make money online. Now let’s think who could win the prizes on your other blogs? You didn’t personalize them yet and might even have some fake identities there. So what do you do now? Well easy… give away the prizes to … yourself … most people take part in a contest to win something, but in case they don’t win and just had to join a mailing list / feed, most people don’t bother. Unless you tell them that they won and don’t give anything to them, then they get angry. The goal of blogging contests is to build. Build your blog, mailing list, feed subscribers, just build your follower base or the foundation your blog is build on.
Taking a fake contest to the next level
A fake contest doesn’t have to stay a fake contest, there might be even sponsors joining your contest and you could start giving away stuff that you, or rather your sponsors, actually have.
What’s the legal side of this? Well probably a contest like this is highly illegal, but the question is what are people required to do to take part in a contest like this? How many people are actually caring about a contest once it is over and they didn’t win? Most likely… no one. Unless you show them a few stats and how great you did, or add some pictures of people using your stuff.
The bottom line: Take care what you take part in!
A fake contest is some nasty thing and in case you take part in a contest, just make sure that you can actually win something. See pictures with the people holding the prizes, or rather videos, everyone can fake a photo nowadays, it’s harder to fake a video for most people. Look at what you have to do, in case you have to give a lot just make sure you can receive a lot, if you give little it’s not that important if you win or not. There are so many contest blogs that just exist for the sake of taking part in a contest, why shouldn’t there be contests that are just designed to gain money and readers on the other side? Easy, because something like this is below the ethics of most people and probably illegal.
