Hello,

I have a small but serious community. It is called History Forum. If you have a look, you will see that most of the discussions are serious and very topic related.

Will a contest be suited for such a serious community? If so what type of contest? Surely I can't say most number of posts win, the quality that the serious posts bring is an asset, and I wouldn't want to dilute that by encouraging non-serious posts.

My budget is around USD 200-250. I can offer some really exciting prizes, books or historical DVD's will be ideal. But I don't know what sort of contest will be most suited.

Or will the money be better suited for Adwords/Overture PPC advertizing?

Thanks!

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Tiempos de Srirangan I Rant Therefore I Am
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As your forum is still very much developing, I would suggest looking round the internet for topic related sites about History. If they are extremely active, it may be they will advertise for around $200USD a month, which seems steep but think about how much targeted traffic it will bring to your forum.

A contest could most definitely work for your community - as long as it is the right contest and you do plenty of research

I feel that there is a good contest out there for any community...you've just got to figure out what it is. That said, your money can also be spent well on advertising or other promotions...so a contest is not your only option

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Thanks Ryan, any suggestions on what type of contest would you think is best suited? Or what type of promotional campaign will be ideal? We could learn from your experience and wisdom in this regard. Thanks!

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Tiempos de Srirangan I Rant Therefore I Am
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That's the tricky part

I don't think that anybody has truly mastered the "best" contests/promotions...as a matter of fact, we can't even think of the perfect contest here at AF and are in the midst of running a contest for our members to submit contest ideas

My suggestion would first be to decide what you would like to get out of the contest - more members, more posts, more content, a new design, talk of the town, more traffic...etc. Then the hard part...figuring out how to do this while adding a "history" twist to it...take a look here to see if there's anything that peaks your interest...if not, try a search for "contests" here at AF...other than that, you'll need to put your thinking cap on

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You're forum is doing well and I'll probably join it as soon as my site is up and running (if anyone cares, my host is really giving me hell... ).

Anyway, you have a good budget, so use it well. I suggest that you pay for about 3 months of advertising on two or three active forums, preferably history/academic ones, but anything with an "intelligent" community would probably work. Anyway, spend about half of your budget on that, then worry about the contest.

As for prizes, history books/DVDs sound like a great idea, maybe you should make the prize an Amazon gift certificate that way users can get whatever book they want.

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Good suggestion, thanks!

A lot of you have recommended going in for advertizing based promotions rather than contests. I'll look into buying a few links on some good history related sites, that will not only drive targetted content but might help with the SERPs.

Thanks for the link Ryan..

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Hi Srirangan, i've had a quick look at your forum and it seems to be going ok, however at the moment the site is still quite small and personally I don't think that you have enough members to run a contest. I was going to suggest having an article contest and the best 3 articles get prizes or something like that. Then you could post your articles on article websites with links to your site. This is a possibility, however I don't think that it will be effective on your forum, mainly due to the fact that there are not that many members. This could mean that fewer people will take part therefore it could just be a waste of your money. Contests are a great idea when they are used at the right time, I don't believe that it is quite the right time for you. I would wait and work on developing your site, maybe spend that money on doing that and then run a contest in a couple of months when I believe it will be much more beneficial to you.

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