Appearing on a competition site or forum can generate a lot of interest for your site. It may not result in immediate sales, if you're a retailer, but embracing compers into your site is a good way to grab people's attention. Use your competition wisely to promote your site, products, offers or sponsors - and use compers to help promote your site by word of mouth.
Avoiding Compers
we appreciate that some sites want to avoid the "comper" entering their competitions. For example, rewarding the loyalty of regular readers by giving them the chance to win prizes or the prize is featured in a specialist publication!
On the whole it can be difficult to prevent compers from entering/finding your competition. As well as using portals, compers will try Google and other search engines!
However, here's a few useful tips....
1. Use Hidden or User Specific URLs
For example use your mailing list to tell subscribers the URL of your competition, and don't advertise the web page on your site until a user has perhaps logged in.
2. Use Forms
If you want people to visit your site and enter a competition, use a web based form. Email addresses and answers can be distributed quite freely and are often picked up by automated entry services.
3. Complicate Questions
Aim the questions at your users - or ask them for a password from your newsletter? Answers will quite possibly find themselves into the public domain so why not rotate the questions too (a randomiser script can do this).
4. Set Restrictions
Country, age and other restrictions can be used to prevent entries from certain areas.
5. Ask For Link Removal
If your site is on Loquax then just ask us to remove it and it'll be removed. If a site has published answers then ask them to remove them.
6. Use Common Sense
The web is after all worldwide. Sites with competitions can be found easily using the search engines, or word of mouth. Competitions can be used as a traffic builder, to gain new customers, so make the most of the opportunity. By preventing entries to your competition you could end up losing out on potential visitors, users, and possibly even future sponsors!
7. Be Polite
If you discover your competition has been "hijacked" by compers and you're upset by it then first off take a deep breath! Some siteowners blow a fuse or two and then throw several teddies out the pram by posting on forums or Twitter about how annoyed they are. This is counter-productive as usually it's you who ends up looking daft and damaging your brand. So stay calm and stay polite - things get sorted so much easier that way!
Remember "compers" do talk, they do have opinions and they do shop on and offline. A well run competition can generate you positive feedback and good comments in many public forums.
