Whether you are working on big projects or small, ensuring a return on your SEO activities is always a concern. When the project you are working on has close to zero budget, that concern becomes paramount at every step: If you don’t get return from your first initiative then you might not have the budget for another. 

When we recently decided to revamp an old side project of mine we found ourselves needing to promote a new site with no real budget to speak of. Using a bit of lateral thinking and one smart trick, we managed to get the site launched and hit our traffic targets. Here’s the story:

How we got ourselves in this situation

One of the things I love to do in the rare occasions that I am offline is ride waves and explore the local harbours in a sit-on-top kayak. Sit-on kayaks have been growing in popularity in recent years and I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of good websites on the topic. So frustrated, in fact, that I registered the domain Sitons.com and roped my team at work into plugging that gap.

Like these things always do, it turned out to be a bigger job than we had originally planned. The inevitable demands of paid work meant that it took longer than we had hoped. Eventually, as winter took over in October, we were ready for the big launch.

One problem, of course: It’s a hobby site, and hobbies rarely pay well. We had next to no budget.

“It’s the start of winter, we have £200 in the kitty, no contacts and we’re trying to launch a new website about open kayaks. Hit it!”

Before I go further I’ll deviate slightly for the benefit of the vast majority of Moz readers who are not in the UK. You might be thinking that while one British pound has significant value, 200 of them might not be a huge budget for a website launch. Let me throw some light on what an understatement that is: £200 is (currently) about 309 US dollars. Roughly one-third the cost of a sit-on kayak (and not much more useful). Not the greatest budget I’d ever worked with; clearly throwing money at the problem was not going to be the answer.

Weighing the competition

I love using competitions as online marketing. They’re a decent way to market things because you are giving things away rather than selling to people. Not only can that make your audience more receptive, but it can also make people happier to talk about, share, and even link to what you are doing. If you can offer a decent prize and you have enough money to get noticed, competitions can bring a great return.

Did you spot the two obvious issues there?

Eye on the prize

It’s a general rule of thumb that the bigger the prize, the more noise you can make with your competition. We needed to get this right the first time, so there was no point in offering a book or a paddle; it had to be something that people would actually want to win.

It’s important to consider your competition's target audience when choosing a prize. It has to match your brand, of course, but it also has to fit the brand of the people you want to help spread the word. Because there are not many sit-on kayak sites out there, we didn't want to pick something that would only appeal to that audience. The prize needed to have broader appeal.

Choose prizes that will not only appeal to your target audience, but to audiences that will help you amplify your competition.

We had already decided that other water sports sites were good candidates to spread the word to their members. After some thinking we came up with a prize that was perfect in all but one way: A GoPro Camera. GoPro makes cameras aimed squarely at the outdoor and extreme sports markets. If you see one being used, it is generally strapped to someone or something that is falling, hurtling, flying, or splashing in some way. They are brilliant pieces of equipment that have a wide appeal, and their Surf edition is perfect for kayakers, windsurfers, surfers, wake boarders and anyone else who likes to take to the water.

The one problem? They cost more than our entire remaining budget.

Never be afraid to ask!

It hadn’t been our intention to get a free camera, but I don’t mind admitting that we were fishing for a bit of a bargain when we contacted GoPro. We explained what we were up to, showed them the site, and were stunned and delighted when they offered to send us a free camera to offer as a prize. We were really fortunate in picking a product from a company that not only really “gets” online marketing, but also loved what we were doing with the website and wanted to support it.

Competition mechanics

One of the easiest ways to run a competition is to use a third-party application. We’ve had a lot of success running Facebook competitions through Woobox, and have heard great things about Rafflecopter, but didn’t feel that either was quite right for this competition. Instead we decided to build our own platform, which I know sounds a little bit mad.

I’ll freely admit that this would not be the best approach. However, our site is built on Drupal, which lends itself brilliantly to such things. I am also lucky enough to employ a number of talented Drupal developers at my digital agency, so it isn’t quite as mad as it sounds.

Building sharing in from the start

One of the feature requirements for this module resulted from us knowing that water sports forums were going to be a key part of the competition's promotion. We wanted to reward people for telling their friends about the competition, and needed that to work easily in forums as well as through social media.

Our approach to that was to give every entrant a unique URL they could share, and to reward them with an extra chance to win for every person who entered the competition from that link (with strict rules in place that would void entries from people who spammed those links). It’s not as slick as using the social APIs, but it does work across every medium.

Announcing the competition

A competition is nothing without entrants, of course, and when you are a new site there is no point in just relying on your own mailing list. That meant getting the word out there.

Forums

The forums we wanted to target were all water-sports related, but loosely fell into two (predictable) camps: 

• Those that cover kayaking (which might make some site owners see us as the competition).
• Those that don’t (which might make some people think we’re just spammers).
  

Forums can be a great way to engage a niche audience, but you do have to play nice and not do anything that might be seen in a negative light. As we were going to be dealing largely with forums that had reason to be less receptive, we opted to speak to the admins every time and only post when we had permission.

No one loves a spammer

That will seem overly conservative to some. It’s often said that it is “easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission,” but this competition marked the start of us building the Sitons.com brand and would be the first contact that our peers in related sports would have with that brand. We’d much rather have a quick chat, be told “no,” and leave with them knowing we’re decent people than be seen as opportunistic — or worse, as spammers.

Several did say “no,” which is fine. However, in some cases the admin posted about the competition themselves, which lends far more weight to the post. I’d much rather have something like this posted by an established member of the community anyway. Whether or not you believe that Google pays more attention to links posted by established members isn’t the point; other members certainly do.

Clubs

We also approached a number of kayaking clubs — a more obvious choice. Most kayaking clubs are for closed-cockpit kayaking, which is focused more on sport kayaking than the more recreational kind that is popular with sit-on kayakers. The two sides are not always as friendly toward one another as you might imagine, but this is where a strong prize with broader appeal can really help build bridges.

Our own resources

Although the site was new, we had some traffic: a few registered users and a small but engaged audience on the Sitons Facebook page.  All of these were utilised to help get a few more entries into the competition.

Paid Stumbles

I hadn’t used Paid Discovery from StumbleUpon to promote a giveaway before, and was keen to try it.  If you haven’t tried Paid Discovery I’d urge you to take a look. It’s incredibly easy to set up and use, and delivers targeted traffic at low prices — we paid under $0.10 per visitor to promote our competition.

The nature of StumbleUpon means that they might not be the most engaged audience, which can lead to high bounce rates. Overall, though, this worked well enough for us and gave us an opportunity to reach targeted users (based on interests) that we would otherwise have struggled to find.

Facebook Ads

Love them or loathe them, Facebook ads are a useful way to reach a targeted audience. A $50 combination of “Post engagement advert” and sponsored story saw the number of entries start to increase and the story also pick up some very welcome likes and shares.

Amplifying the Response

The initial competition launch was starting to make some noise, and we could see some responses trickling in. What we needed to do then was to amplify that noise to get our message heard by more people.

Encouraging Shares

This is where our competition mechanics came in to play. Because we were rewarding entrants for getting their friends to take part we had the perfect excuse to encourage them all to share the competition. 

We made it easy to share the link in Facebook and Twitter, and of course gave them a clean URL to share if they wanted to include it on a forum or in an email. Most importantly, we presented these as soon as they had entered the competition with a strong call to action encouraging them to share (and reminding them of the benefits).

Competition Sites

There are many websites that will help promote a prize competition, but I use them with caution. Most attract “pro-compers.” Pro-compers are like the ninjas of the prize-draw world and will be in and out without leaving you a trace of a real human to work with. These are the places to go if you ever need to get numbers up, but don’t expect to have too many engaged users as a result, thanks to the use of social profiles and email accounts dedicated to their full-time comping.

We did make sure that ours got a mention on at least one forum like this, by tipping off a connection who was a regular of the site.

Competition Results

The competition received over 500 legitimate entries, which was almost exactly what we had targeted. Considering that the competition was in quite a niche, and that we had quite a high barrier to entry (you needed to register on the site to be entered), we considered that a great success. We’d also picked up a few nice links as a result, and were seeing some improvement in the SERPs.

This is often when people apply the brakes, congratulate themselves on a job well done, and start considering the next promotion. However, the real power of this promotion was yet to come. As a special reward for reading this far in what I know is a long post, I’m going to share what we did next to get some real results.

Our secret weapon: the qualifying question

It’s not unusual to see a qualifying question in a competition, but we chose ours carefully. We asked every entrant to tell us their dream place to kayak. It’s a simple enough question, but adding that to the entry form meant that we were not just running a competition, we were conducting a one question poll.

Competitions = data collection

I don't mean that in terms of building an e-mail list, either (although that is another discussion). When I am looking at competitions as a source of data I am looking to use them as a research tool to get some new insight.

Now, what to do with all that lovely data?

Free content!

Our next step was to write up the results. We had always planned an article off the back of this, but the breadth of answers we got from the poll (plus our own love of some of the places featured) led us to turn it into three articles that we released over the coming weeks.

Breaking the articles down like this also allowed us to target different groups. In particular, we wanted to separate the UK data so that we could target the places that appeared in the poll. The great thing about having “place” data is that most places are served by at least one website who would love an excuse to talk about the virtues of where they are based. This was a fantastic result for us with mentions on some authoritative regional sites such as isleofman.com and jurassiccoast.org (among others) as well as some great niche sites like harlynsurfschool.co.uk and cornishrocktors.com all of which were grateful to hear how their area did in the poll and kindly linked back to us when covering the story.

Enter the infographic

Our final push was to turn the results in to an easy-to-digest infographic that we could encourage other sites to use.

I won’t pretend that putting together an infographic is a quick process, but there are plenty of tools out there to help you if you aren’t adept with Illustrator, and it’s worth the effort. Infographics appeal to a different audience and grab their attention more easily.

Adding an infographic gave us an excuse to get back in contact with those sites that didn’t respond to the initial story. Some of them used the infographic, and for others the infographic was enough to spark interest in the original story; they published it without using the infographic at all.

If you are producing infographics, be sure to add them to imageraider.com. Imageraider monitors the web for times when your images are used on other websites — the perfect outreach opportunity

Summing up

The competition worked for us; we are happy with the results. However, it was being able to turn the data collected in to a story that really got results. We picked up links, traffic, and mentions from a number of sites that would otherwise have never have mentioned Sitons.com. More importantly, it’s been a great introduction to some contacts in the industry, local press in some key locations, and several tourism departments. We also picked up some big retweets and shares, and the latest development is that our infographic (complete with a mention of our site) was featured as the centerpiece in a six-page spread in The Paddler Magazine.

None of this would have happened off the back of the competition alone.

There are definitely things I’d have done differently if we did the same again. We’d certainly lower the barrier to entry, and we’d make better use of the email confirmations and winner announcement emails. We also didn’t write out the plan from the start, as this was not a formal commercial project, which definitely caused us to miss a few opportunities.

That all said, the concept of using a competition to gather data for a "second push" performed better than we had hoped. As a result this is an approach that we have been refining and using commercially since. If anyone has read this far and not tried this approach I hope that you might give it a go now.