Hosting a contest is often an underutilized but effective method of attracting more subscribers to your list.

A contest puts leverage to work for you because you're using the resources of many people to obtain one goal which is to obtain subscribers and traffic to your site.

You might want to know that a contest involves skill and while a sweepstake takes luck. Many people do not know the difference between these two terms. Now you know and here's why it's important to know.

Every heard of eBay? You probably have unless you've been living under a rock for the last 5 years. eBay is the largest and most popular auction site on the internet.

Their site is one of the top 10 most trafficked sites on the internet every month.

eBay is so popular because it's bargain central and more importantly a playground for competitive bargain hunters. Competition is the key word here. Since contests involve skill they bring out the competitive nature in people.

When competition rears his ugly head it's hard to stuff him back in his hole.

To start a competitive contest you need to contact product owners and ask them to donate prizes.

Here is what I do. I set up a web page describing all the benefits to the product owner for donating a prize. This is a simple joint venture which requires nothing from the author but a prize donation.

You will have to tell them all the boost of traffic that they will get to their site from the contest page.

Many times the way contests are set up is that several product owners donate a prize and everyone who donates a prize has to send a mailing to his or her list.

The contest organizer creates a central page listing all the prizes with a link to the sales page of the prize.

What happens is that people will go to the central page, enter the contest and wait to see if they win the prize(s). If they don't win they just might buy the prizes because they're so interested in the prizes.

That's where the product owners benefit. By agreeing to give away a prize they will get some potential sales and a lot of traffic which could result in more subscribers to their mailing list.

Usually the way that winners are picked from these types of contests are random drawings which require luck. Then it's not a contest but a sweepstake.

You can get some results with sweepstakes but you won't get massive results unless you run a competitive contest which is based on skill.

You must require people to do something to earn the prize. Many times you will be required to join all the mailing lists of the contest prize donators. Generally, the more mailing list that the entrant is required to join the less likely they will enter.

It's not effective for the contest donators also because if people are joining 5-10 different mailing lists at the same time they will become overwhelmed with information and unsubscribe from most of them.

The less you require from entrants the more people you have entering the contest.

The points to remember when setting up a successful contest is to:

1. Make sure winners are chosen by skill

2. Have a lot of valuable prizes

3. Do not require so much from the entrants

4. Have lots of people with big mailing lists promote the contest

Now here's how you as the contest organizer benefit. You get to use affiliate links to show people the prizes they will win.

You also get to have the email of all the entrants of the contest so you can send them consolation prizes in the form of discounts or specials from the prize donators.

In effect, contests are great list builders.

If you've never held a contest before it requires a little coordinating at first but is very rewarding for everyone if you do everything right.

Gary Huynh is an expert at using contests to gain thousands of subscribers to his various mailing lists. Learn how to get your own contest set up for you in 5 minutes and start promoting it to build your own list. Also enter to win over $4,100 in prizes in his ongoing contest.

http://tinyurl.com/33hyp

Copyright Eugenia Bivines