Now, at the ripe old age of 31, I work as the inbound marketer for buuteeq. But for most of my rambunctious 20s, people knew me best as Oxhorn, purveyor of animated video game movies and silly songs on YouTube. I developed a bit of an online reputation during college that I've been casually nursing while trying to juggle a career and new family. It was only recently that I even thought about using my new-found professional knowledge about inbound marketing, combined with my active fan base, to increase my social influence and get some sort of SEO benefit to help my much-neglected web properties.

Enter: Contests

So last July, I hosted nine contests aimed at gamers, with thousands of dollars in prizes in order to gain further exposure, stir up my fan base and get some quality backlinks for my websites. I ended up with 130 unique contest submissions, an unsolicited sponsor who donated some sick prizes, hundreds of (mediocre) backlinks and very happy community. In this post mortem, I'll share what I learned from this experience, elaborate on the things I did right, those I did wrong and sketch a nine-step guide for contests.

Nine Steps to Running a Successful Contest

#1) 'Get' Your Peeps

Every public person and business has a distinct audience or customer-base. What may work for me and my audience may not work for yours. Celebrities can get away with making contests all about themselves--signed photos, albums, etc.--but a business can't. A business' followers are interested in the business' product. Very seldom are they interested in the brand for the sake of the brand.

Even though I find my own self very fascinating, I know my followers are much more interested in video games, animation and music. If I had my way, I would have hosted a contest that somehow incorporated scotch, cigars, Cab Calloway and beards. Instead, I made my contests about video games--specifically World of Warcraft, the game of choice amongst my followers. Because I crafted my contest around what my audience wanted, I believe I got much more interaction than I otherwise would have.

#2) Write Clear Rules

Little is as important as writing clear rules. Sometimes, fans will do everything they can to manipulate them to make it easier for them to win. More often than not (at least with me) you will take for granted certain things that you think are obvious to everyone (you can see my contest rules here).

One of my contests was a short animated movie contest. I obviously intended every entry to be original, and to be made during the time period of my contest, specifically for my contest, but I didn't spell this out for people in my rules. I had to go back and edit them (and put in a few healthy disclaimers) after I started to gets video submissions made and published by people three or more years ago.

Make sure your rules are written in clear, plain language, and protect yourself with as many disclaimers as you feel are necessary. Have your lawyer draft them, if you can.

#3) Be Personal and Reachable

Part of the fun of participating in a contest is getting to interact with a favorite personality or brand. Even if you don't win the contest, you feel like you had valuable interaction with the host, which can galvanize you are a super-fan or brand ambassador. Even if you are a faceless brand, get on Twitter and Facebook and directly respond to customer questions, kudos and submissions to your contests. Praise their entries publicly and thank them (even if the entry is really bad!)

Blizzard Entertainment gave me 125 beta keys for their upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, to give away to my community as I saw fit. I decided to get rid of them by hosting a type of contest I really enjoy, which I call a Marco Polo contest. Each winner of my Marco Polo contest won one of my beta keys. The gist went like this: At some random point in the day, I'm going to hop onto one of my social networks and shout the word "Marco". The first to respond with "Polo", won a beta key. (Well, in this case, the call was PANDA and response, EXTERMINATOR...but that's a story for another day).

I made sure to respond personally to every winner, and even to contestants who didn't win but voiced their disappointment on my social networks. I wanted to make sure they knew that I was rooting for them, and that there were plenty more opportunities to win. This increased awareness of my contests by extending the life and reach of my Facebook posts and it made fans on Twitter curious about my sudden burst of engagement. Even weeks into the contests, I still got posts and tweets from followers saying, "Whoa, wait, Oxhorn's doing a contest? What contest?", garnering me one more participant. Note that my contests have been over for a month plus, and my social media followers have continued to rise--the follower were sticky and engaged.

#4) Be Impartial

People will try to win your favor by giving you compliments, retweeting every tweet, liking every post, ending every message in a mention or hashtag and offering you bribes. Which you want. But don’t let the flattery compromise your better judgment. Even though the majority of those who entered my contests were good-natured people just having a fun time, there were a few who offered me bribes or pointed to their past generosity to encourage me to give the prizes to them.

Be Overly Generous

In order to maintain your credibility, you must be impartial. Nothing can be worse than to have bitter contestants who walk away feeling like the contest was rigged. If you can, be overly generous when it is all said and done. I originally only offered one prize for each contest--a total of nine prizes. The contest entries were so great that I added an extra winning Runner Up to each contest, and gave out additional prizes to make as many people happy as possible (and also to reduce as many 'He should have picked X' comments as possible).

It's true, you may alienate a few clingy customers who feel like they deserve the prize more than others, or you should have judged them more favorably, but ignore them. You can't make everyone happy, and if you do it right, they will be a significant minority. If you are impartial, it will be noticed and you'll be respected. Your reputation is worth more than one satiated bully.

#5) Have Great Prizes & Show Them Off

This ties back in with 'get' your peeps, but have great prizes you know your fans will want. Are they followers of your personal philosophy? Offer them a signed copy of your book, or a year's free subscription to your paid content. Do they just adore your product and use it every day? Give them a free one, or a free upgrade, or a special, limited edition rhinestone covered widget complete with neon pink zebra stripes that they can sell on eBay in ten years for a thousand dollars. Or one.

In my case, I had collected a whole lot of World of Warcraft swag over the years from the many conventions Blizzard had invited me to. Figurines, in-game pets, free subscriptions, signed prints--the stuff was cluttering my closet, so I used the contests as a convenient way to get rid of it all to an audience who would appreciate it.

I took pictures of all the prizes and arrayed them on my contest page so fans could see exactly what they were going to get. I feel like being able to see the tangibles encouraged contest interaction.

#6) You Don't Have to Empty Your Pockets

Your prizes don't have to break the bank. Back in 2008, I was working for an internet startup in San Francisco. As the community and creative guy, I decided to host some contests to stir up some interest in the company. For my first contest, we gave away $10,000 in prizes, including brand new computers, laptops and limited edition gaming hardware. Our contest entries were amazing! The contest went so well that I wanted to do it again, but my boss would only allow me to spend $1,000 on prizes this time. Even so, we got more entries than we did for the first contest--and they were just as high quality.

For my recent contests, I had to fund the whole thing myself. Every prize was something I already personally owned, or it was otherwise given to me. My total out-of-pocket cost (not counting time) was about $200. Next time, I won't allow international contestants. Shipping outside the USA is expensive. Lesson learned. Still, $200 is a small price to pay for a happy community and a stronger marketing presence.

#7) Use Every Tool at Your Exposure

I promoted the snot out of this contest using all my social channels. My most powerful one is YouTube, so naturally I released a YouTube video announcing the contest (sorry about the sound quality, my microphone was malfunctioning that day). I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, so I just uploaded a small segment from my weekly live show where I laid out the rules. That day, my Facebook and Twitter followers enjoyed a significant boost which has lasted.

I learned email marketing on the job here at buuteeq, but I had never used it for my hobby. Instead, I'll queue my Buffer with interesting things I think my fans will enjoy so that they have something to read while I'm at work. I host a live weekly show where I chat with them and take questions. And that's about it. A few months ago, I figured I'd try a monthly email newsletter, just to see if I had the patience and if I would get any engagement. I got about 5,000 of my fan's email address, loaded up FanBridge and started my monthly newsletter.

I got some new clicks, it seemed all well and good but it wasn’t something I did often. When I started these contests, I thought I'd go ahead and email the fans to let them know, in case they missed it on social. The day after I sent the email, I got a response from an old buddy I used to know when I lived in California. He connected me to a friend of his who works at GUNNAR, which sells advanced gaming eyewear, and GUNNAR became an official sponsor of my contests, donating over $500 worth of their product to my fans, and giving them a 15% discount during my contest period (they recently told me that they got many sales because of the discount--more than making back the prizes they donated to me).

Even though almost all of my contestants heard about my contest from social media, using a new channel I was uncomfortable with paid off big time. Use every tool you have, even if you're not confident with that channel yet. Who knows who you'll touch?

#8) Know What You Want to Get Out Of It

I had very specific goals for my contests. I wanted to get rid of all this video game clutter, I wanted to make the fans happy, I wanted to make Blizzard happy by handing out their beta keys, I wanted more social subscribers and I wanted some decent backlinks. I designed my Marco Polo contest with gaining more social followers in mind. I had fewer Google+ followers than Twitter and Facebook followers (who doesn't) so I added that network to the contest. I was added to dozens more circles, gained 292 Twitter followers, 330 new Facebook Page fans (and 400 new profile subscribers).

I also wanted to increase the reach and influence of my social spaces. The contest helped gain me exposure and new followers, which have, so far, stuck around. Notice that my Twitter influence has risen after the contest has ended.

I have three websites--a classy blog, a home for my animated movies and place for my weekly live show. I have done zero SEO work on these web properties. I don't have time! I work all day doing SEO and inbound marketing for buuteeq. The last thing I want to do is slave away on three different Wordpress sites when I get home (what's that they say about a cobbler's family having no shoes?). Thus, all of my websites are sorely neglected.

I figured this contest could be a fun way to generate some backlinks, and so for a number of the contests, I required contestants to post their submissions on their own blogs, websites and image sharing accounts and include links back to any or all of my websites. With 130 unique submissions, I got a slew of new backlinks from many unique domains spread more or less evenly across all three of my websites. Will Google index them? Will they help me? We'll see.

I don't think the backlinks will help me in a meaningful way, but I had specific goals for these contests and I achieved them. Know what you want to gain from your contests and have a way to measure your success. This will give you the evidence you need to convince a boss to do it again someday in the future, or to adjust your strategy for the next one.

#9) Track Your Success or Failure

I used Facebook Insights, Topsy and Twitter Counter to monitor my social interactions and the contest results. I gained a good assortment of engaged, interactive followers. I also got a handful of new regular attendees of my web show, who discovered it because of the contest, and my blog got around ten new subscribers and dozens of new comments.

The backlinking aspect of my contests was an experiment. I had never done anything like it before. As you can see in the chart below, I got a nice bump of backlinks that dwindled down to normal levels after the contest ended. To be honest, I don't know if I will include this as part of the contest in the future. It was hard explaining the contest rule to some people (you'd be surprised how many people don't know what a hyperlink is) and it took time for me to check every entry to make sure they included the backlink.

Contests take a lot of time, focus and energy, but they can be very fun. I have seen nothing else energize a community more than contests. Thanks for listening to my experience! Have you got any ideas for fun contests your fans or customers might enjoy? Let me know in the comments if you think there are steps I missed or could have executed better.