Using Contests
The first and very basic rule of marketing is to catch the attention of the consumer. When talking about the marketing tools, there are many tools which can be used to promote your product. One of these marketing tools is using contests for promoting your products. Contests can be a very easy way of attracting the people to your product, for building your email list and also for building links.
However, one thing that you should understand before presenting your contest is the fact that these contests have mixed reputation with the people. As most of the people believe these contests to be spam so one of the basic considerations before using contests as marketing tool is to attain the trust of the people before persuading them to enter the contest.
The people get to know about your products and your business through contests as the contests give a lot of exposure to your services, brand and your products. Since by holding contest you are bringing a lot of people to your web page, you are actually helping your site to gain the required traffic. Once you implement the contest, it is not a difficult task to convince the people as everyone likes free stuff without doing much of a hard work. It works as a two way motivation; for the people, they get free stuff and for your websites, you get a lot of traffic.
Besides only boosting traffic, another way that these contests benefit you is the fact that they promote your brand by keeping it right in front of people’s eyes and it is one of the best ways of creating list of subscribers. All you need to do is to be smart enough to set the guidelines according to your benefits and needs and then persuade the people to your benefit.
From http://www.buzzle.com/articles/using-contests-as-a-marketing-tool.html