$300 RSS Contest Results
December 27, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzThe $300 RSS Contest is now over. I’d like to thank everyone for participating – it went far better than I had expected (more on that below).
I’d also like to thank the various blogs which mentioned the contest, as it helped spread the word I’m sure.
But the biggest thanks has to of course go out to the contest’s sponsor, NeverBlueAds. Without their generosity, this contest would have simply not been possible.
If you haven’t already read my write-up and short review about them yet, check out the original contest post.
… or simply check out NeverBlueAds for yourself. They are getting rave reviews from everyone right now and offer a referral program as well, so it’d be smart to join and start sending them referrals before the majority of publishers are already signed up with them!
The Winners
Six lucky winners each won $50 via PayPal courtesy of NeverBlueAds.To determine the winners through randomization, I exported my Feedburner E-mail list to Random.org which randomized the entire list for me, and then took the first 6 entries from the randomized list as can be seen in the screenshot below:
I will be e-mailing the winners shortly after publishing this post – Congratulations! $50 can buy you a domain and hosting for a year, so it’s nothing to scoff at 🙂
Effects of the Contest
A lot of you are probably interested to see how much the contest helped me blog (If you aren’t, you should be!). I think that the majority of contest holders fail to inform their readers as to the effects of their contests… which is a real shame as it is extremely valuable information.
Sharing this with your readers lets them know what type of contests do well, what doesn’t, just exactly how well they do, etc. In fact, part of the reason I held this contest in the first place was to simply see for myself just how much impact running a blog contest had, since I couldn’t find much in the way of detailed statistics from other blog contests.
So how did the contest do? Absolutely fantastic. I launched the contest one week ago, and when I launched it I had a total of 29 e-mail RSS subscribers. I now have 197 which means that 168 people subscribed to my RSS e-mail subscription due to this contest.
Now, the real question is: now that the contest is over, how many of these people will unsubscribe?
I’m not stupid – I know that a lot of people subscribed purely for the contest, and that’s fine – I can’t blame anyone for doing that. But I’m also optimistic and think that I managed to sign up a lot of people who will stay on, but just never subscribed before because they were too lazy!
My hope is that 50% of those 168 new RSS subscribers will remain, because 80 new RSS subscribers from a $300 contest is still very good in my opinion. I’ll try to keep you guys reminded in a couple weeks to see how the numbers have changed by then – if I don’t, somebody remind me 🙂
The image above shows the breakdown of my RSS subscription sources. Previously, the FeedBurner Email Subscriptions didn’t even show on the pie chart since it made up too small a chunk. Now it accounts for the 3rd largest piece! I like this because diversification is usually a good thing; it’s good not to have all your eggs in one basket such as only one website or only one type of advertising, and it’s good not to depend on only one source of RSS reader.
The past few days, I’ve been setting new RSS records each day. I now have 1075 RSS, which is absolutely great! My Technorati is improving, too.
Oh, and I almost forgot. In addition to the RSS increase, I managed to refer 6 publishers to NeverBlueAds through my referral URL, which is great for both them and me.
Sponsor my Next Contest!
In fact, if you’re interested in sponsoring my next blog contest, shoot me an e-mail with what you can put up. You’ll get a decent amount of exposure, especially since a lot of other blogs post and link about the contest. Just look how much I wrote about NeverBlueAds in my original post, it’s almost as good as a Paid Review.
I’m looking for prizes worth at least $200, but the more the better 🙂
So I won! Thank You. I have just recieved my price ($50) Thank you for the very fast prize payment. 🙂 I’m waiting for your another contest and hope to win again.
Again, Thank You.
Many thanks for the 50 bucks, Tyler (and Never Blue)!!!!
For a second, I thought it might have been some kind of phishing thang, but paypal never lies!
And no, I’m not going to unsubscribe to your RSS – there’s so much there for me to learn yet.
Again, thanks.
Terry. (winner #3)
Great contest Tyler, keep them coming.
But yeah I struck out on this one. 🙂
Hi,
Happy to see the results 🙂
I was subscribed here of the view to win the contest but i think your posts are worth reading to me.
Best of luck Tyler for your next contest. Don’t worry about me, I’m a big fan of yours & also I’m your life time subscriber.
Happy holidays.
Sincerely,
Muneeb
Congrats to the winners 🙂
-Mike
Congratulations to the winners and to Tyler for a successful contest.
I forgot to congratulate the winners.
CONGRATULATIONS to all the winners (including me)!
Great contest.
Congrats to the winners!
I just saw, theres another RSS record, 1109! I think by next year, it could very well be 2000+
Yay! I won another thing this week 😀 Thanks Tyler (and thanks random.org 😆 )
By the way, it’s nice to see that you shared the results of the contest. Shows how much a contest can benefit you if you do it right…
Huhuhu. I didn’t win but that’s ok. Hoping to win the next contest soon. Hehehe. Watch out! 🙂
And oh, I won’t subscribe from your list. I’m gonna learn a lot from you.
I’m sure these winners appreciate having their email addresses posted above for all to see (harvest)….I would have thought Tyler would have a little more common sense with his years of experience…..
Good thing it’s an image hey Steve.
Good thing for OCR or people who may simply manually add them to a harvester or their own list.
Sorry Tyler, but I unsubscribed from your email feed 🙁 I will however still subscribe to your blog using the RSS feed 🙂 like I did before the contest.
/Andreas
Tyler, congratulations on your 168 new subscribers, but, as I’ve stated on Gyutae’s blog over at WinningTheWeb (another successful contest) as well, the ball is in your court as far as the issue of keeping those subscribers is concerned.
But since both of you post great content on a regular basis, I’m sure you won’t be dissapointed with the way things develop 🙂
Bummer I wished I had won!! Oh well, I will definitely use that Ramdon.org for my next contest though. Thanks for the tip 🙂
Awesome! I won! Thanks Tyler and NeverBlueAds!
Haven’t gotten an email from you yet, though. Will wait for it 🙂
Congratulations to the other winners!
Celene,
I e-mailed all 6 of those people… only heard back from four I believe though. Please e-mail me from the same e-mail you have in the RSS e-mail subscription and I’ll try to respond to it.
The e-mail I sent through might have been marked as spam since the title sounds a bit spammy (TylerCruz.com RSS Contest – Congratulations!)
Tyler, what did those 6 people have to say about you posting their email to your fairly popular blog?
I’m holding a contest that I just started. The prize? $50 Adwords Account. Everybody likes free advertising right? If it was cash, they’d probably spend it on advertising anyway. It’s on my blog if anybody wants to read about it.
Thanks for sharing the results of the contest. That’s quite impressive. 😛
Congrats to the winners.
I’m sure they didn’t mind having their email addresses shown on the website, since they weren’t actually posted (it’s only a screenshot).
Alan Johnson
Ah I see. I didn’t realize that at first. That’s what I get for skimming.
Congratulations to the winners of the contest 🙂 and to Tyler too, for getting what he wanted out of it to X,XXX subscriptions 😉
Just wanted to say thanks again. I will remain a subscriber as Terry said it best…”there’s so much there for me to learn yet.”
On the emails being revealed, I’m ok with it as it’s just an image. I still would have preferred it not to be shown, but too late now huh?
Again, thanks for the $50 🙂
you’ve been lingering at around 800 rss for a while and i’m glad you jumped up to the 1k mark. you even got someone to front the bill. genius. this was a better deal then winningtheweb as far as investment is concerned. good job to the winners. wish i got in on this action. cash is the best prize.
Received the money. Thanks Tyler! Some more and it’ll be time to order a review 🙂
Got the payment, Tyler 🙂 Thanks!
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