Would this work?

[Techie]

Let's say I create a one week contest for webmasters. I would make a new section at my forum where only members with 5+ posts could make threads. To enter the contest you would have to join the forum, make 5 posts, then make a thread to submit your forum. The forum submission would be just summarizing your site and telling why it should be chosen as the winner.

All week long I look through the submissions. I then choose a winner based on the forum I feel deserves the prize the most. The prize is a two week sitewide banner (no rotation) advertising this site and a full SEO audit on the site (which comes as a page on our blog, which includes a dofollow link back to this site).

The winning site benefits from lots of exposure from TechGeeks and lots of ways they can improve their site's rankings. TechGeeks benefits from increased activity in the forum from all these webmasters (which will jumpstart our webmaster and SEO sections). Nobody really loses.

What do you think of this idea? Would it work? Do you see any flaws with it?

 

[AnAccount]

It would depend on how active your forum is, for starters. I would give it more than one week as well. One week isn't long enough for interested people to register. When we held our first contest, I let my members jump in anytime as long as they did so by the deadline. I did it that way because some people are quicker posters than others, and it wouldn't be fair, I thought to do it all in one week even though the deadline was November 1 at the time.

 

[Techie]

It would depend on how active your forum is, for starters. I would give it more than one week as well. One week isn't long enough for interested people to register. When we held our first contest, I let my members jump in anytime as long as they did so by the deadline. I did it that way because some people are quicker posters than others, and it wouldn't be fair, I thought to do it all in one week even though the deadline was November 1 at the time.

I'm hoping that this would attract new members too 🙂 How long did you let your members have from the beginning to the end?

 

[David]

Like Ashley said, it would depend on how noticed you are. Also, you seem to be aiming at forum owners, but the majority of members may not necessarily be forum owners. You have really 2 sections and 5 or so other sections, so from first glance, I'm not sure which audience you are trying to target. Maybe consider the target audience at first and see if that suffices for the majority of the community. I would hate to feel left out because I didn't own a forum.

 

[AnAccount]

It would depend on how active your forum is, for starters. I would give it more than one week as well. One week isn't long enough for interested people to register. When we held our first contest, I let my members jump in anytime as long as they did so by the deadline. I did it that way because some people are quicker posters than others, and it wouldn't be fair, I thought to do it all in one week even though the deadline was November 1 at the time.

I'm hoping that this would attract new members too 🙂 How long did you let your members have from the beginning to the end?

I think we started sometime in either September or October if I remember right, so that was more than a week. Also, the deadline had to be pushed back as we did a revamp of the forum on November first, which was the deadline for the contest to end. So we ended up letting people have one more go at the contest, and I think we wound up announcing winners on the second or the third of the month.

 

[Marc]

Let's say I create a one week contest for webmasters. I would make a new section at my forum where only members with 5+ posts could make threads. To enter the contest you would have to join the forum, make 5 posts, then make a thread to submit your forum. The forum submission would be just summarizing your site and telling why it should be chosen as the winner.

Sounds like "website of the week" to me.

If your forum doesn't have much forum owners, you'll have to do a lot of promoting.

 

[CodyCool]

Sounds like a wonderful idea! But you do need get this contest some more attention, and have it spotlighted on several websites with large crowds. BTW: Nice idea!