I am planning on having a contest on a dead forum, with a decent prize (a NANO of Gift Certificate worth the same) within the next 2 months. The contest will include a blog post and minimum of 5 posts on my site. The winner will be drawn randomly, also the entry to the contest will be 1 per blog post on different blog. There will probably be other rules like age of blog etc, but that is about it.

I have read before that for a contest to be successful the forum has to look active, so I am planning on buying/exchanging posts for a couple of weeks before the contest is to start.

My question is this, what are some good ways to promote the contest other than, adding to sig on other forums, posting comments in blogs, getting other blogs to post about the contest, and adwords.

I have set a $ budget of $500 and a time budget of 2hr per day (I do have a day job and family).

Any ideas would be great, thanks

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Tell everybody you know and tell them to tell their friends...Natural word of mouth is very powerful (and free!)

I'd try to get an announcement about your contests onto as many blogs as possible....If you can get friends to announce it for you for free, that's great, but even if you have to pay, that is ok also.

What kind of forum is this? That will also determine how to best promote the contest.

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It is a forum that started out based in politics, North American / World / Africa

It had branched out into Sports and Entertainment discussion before it collapsed. It simply didn't reach that critical mass needed to run without a lot of owner help.

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So what is the forum about now?

What kind of people do you want to attract to it?

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I would like to attract politically minded people. However I don't want the one minded types who just preach rhetoric.

But for now I would be happy with a dozen active members no matter what they want to talk about.

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Well, you've got to advertise somewhere...so you might as well advertise to the people you'd *ideally* like to have. I would contact some political websites/blogs/forums and go from there. See what they can do for you.

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You can also try harnessing the power of social networks like Myspace or Facebook. Create a profile, add friends with similar interests, post on their profiles & build up their trust, and then invite them to your forum privately.

Add a 'links' section to your site, and try a link exchange with similar sites.

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I am not sure if that will work well for a contest that is of a relatively short time period. I have that set up now for longer term linking and promotion, but from all of my thinking contest promotion is a different fish altogether

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