Why and How to Run a Competition on a WordPress Website

February 8, 2017 / WordPress

Why and How to Run a Competition on a WordPress Website

Competitions and giveaways are a great way to improve user engagement, increase traffic and promote your business. The other good news is that with WordPress, it’s very easy to set them up. In this post, we’ll explain the benefits of running a competition and look at a selection of useful plugins you can use to create them on your website.

The benefits of running a competition on your website

Competitions are an excellent way of generating new traffic. There are many competition hobbyists who trawl the net every day looking for competitions to enter and there are websites that cater for these people by listing sites where competitions can be found. You can advertise your competition for free on sites such as The PrizeFinder to help people find your site. You can also promote your competitions on social media.

Another benefit of holding a competition is that you can make entrants like your site on social media or sign up for your newsletter in order to enter. The first of these will help generate more visitors and raise brand awareness whilst the second will allow you to send targeted email marketing to those individuals who have subscribed.

Competitions are also great for engaging your visitors. They are often fun and can be used to get people to visit different pages of your website, for example, asking a question which requires them to read a landing page advertising your newest products.

Finally, competitions are an easy way to promote your products and increase sales. If you are giving away one of your products as a prize, some of those that don’t win will likely come back and buy one.

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How to set up a competition on your website

The best way to run a competition on your website is to use a specialised plugin. These make it easy for you to set up competitions because everything is automated. All you will need to do is fill in the details such as what the prize is, the terms of entering and the opening and closing dates.

Here are some of our favourite competition plugins.

  1. Wishpond Social Contests
    Wishpond Social Contests
    Wishpond Social Contests is an easy to use, responsive plugin that enables WordPress users to set up a variety of competitions including sweepstakes, photo, video and music competitions. It also meets the regulations for Facebook competitions so that you can post it on your site’s Facebook page.
    One of the best things about this plugin is that it gives readers the opportunity to vote, so you can increase engagement by letting your readers choose the winners of your competitions. Alternatively, you can use it to show products or product ideas to your customers, get customers to vote on their favourites and then get the plugin to pick a winner or multiple winners.
    The plugin has a drag and drop interface, comes with over 50 templates, and even allows A/B split testing so you can see which types of competition gel with your audience the best.
  2. Opinion Stage
    Opinion Stage
    Opinion Stage is a great plugin to engage your readers and build email and social media lists for generating future leads and sales. It enables the creation of attractively presented polls, quizzes, and surveys which can be used to gather user opinions or to entertain your readers as part of the competition.
    The competitions you can run using Opinion Stage are interactive and fun to do. Unlike some other plugins, they look professionally created and will be useful in enhancing your brand’s image you can even place your logo in the content.
    Importantly, you can customise the look of the competition and you have the freedom to place it in different locations on your site so that you don’t have to redirect your visitors to a new page every time.
  3. InviteBox
    InviteBox
    Lots of websites develop new leads and sales by asking customers to refer a friend. For many, this is done by offering a cash reward, however, the InviteBox plugin lets you do this in a more fun and less expensive way by enabling you to run a refer-a-friend competition. What’s particularly useful is that visitors are only likely to refer friends who they think your products or services will be useful to, so this plugin is likely to generate much more targeted traffic.
    The plugin is easy to use and a referral program can be created very quickly. The rewards you offer can also be tailored to help you generate even more income, for example, offering discounts off future purchases. You can even reward visitors for sharing your content on social media to encourage more traffic.
  4. Photo Contest WordPress Plugin
    Photo Contest WordPress Plugin
    Photo competitions are one of the best ways to engage your readers whilst getting them to promote your products and services. The most valuable competitions are those where you ask your readers to send in snaps of them using the things you have sold them. For example, if you sell camping equipment, ask for holiday photos showing the family staying in the tent or if you have a recipe website, ask for photos of the dishes people have made using your recipes.
    Doing this encourages existing customers to revisit whilst letting new readers discover how fantastic your products are. As a result, you have more opportunity to increase both new and return sales. In addition, you can get visitors and entrants to like and share the photos on social media, creating even more interest in your website.
  5. ContestFriends for WordPress
    ContestFriends for WordPress
    ContestFriend for WordPress is a responsive plugin with which you can run any number of contests and have unlimited entries. Its special features include:
  • An entry system which rewards and encourages users to share on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+
  • Integration with a range of email providers (Aweber, MailChimp, etc.) so that your subscribers can take part when they receive your newsletter.
  • The ability to create your own rules and disclaimers so they fit the terms and conditions of your own website.

The ContestFriend plugin can be customised to include custom fields and entry notifications. You can also add your own background image or even a video.

Conclusion

Many websites use competitions to drive engagement, increase traffic and generate new business. From reading this article, you should have a better understanding of how this is done and which plugins you can use to achieve this on your own WordPress site.

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Author

  • Arjun Shinde

    I'm an experienced digital marketer with expertise in planning, SEO, SEM, and social media. I'm good at creating engaging content and optimising campaigns for a strong online presence.

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