How To Create An Easy YouTube Competition (Drive Hordes Of Traffic To Your Website & Build Your Mailing List Fast)

This online video competition on YouTube is a great way to get some excitement going around your website, product or service even if you are not techie at all. I know there are lots of whizzy scripty ways to do this stuff, but I wanted to lay out a system even the non-techies can follow.

A couple of years ago one of our companies, The Money Gym, held a video competion on YouTube.  We invited people to submit video entries to win a whole year’s worth of wealth creation mentoring with me personally (not available normally) and lots of other goodies.  We called it “Gold For Christmas” and the prizes were worth over £12,000 ($15,000).

As well as creating a load of excitement and goodwill among our subscribers, the competition generated a TON of traffic to our YouTube channel, comments on our blog, Tweets and Facebook mentions and extra sales of our range of products and events.

My partner in The Money Gym, Judith Morgan, is about to run a video competition of her own, and asked me to outline the step-by-step system I used for us previously, and we thought it might be useful to share it with you, our subscribers and blog readers.

ONLINE VIDEO COMPETITION

Competition – Preparation

First of all, you need to decide which key word / phrase you want to target with your competition.  Next you need to know that the competition entries are going to upload their entry video to their own YouTube accounts but you want them to do it in a very specific way.

1. You want them all to save the video onto their computer/youtube channel using a specific file naming protocol such as “money_gym_gold_competition_entryname.wmv”

2. You want them all to use the same title to their video when editing the details

3. Ditto the same introductory paragraph in their description, including your http:// URL first.  An example would be

http://TheMoneyGym.com – The Money Gym is giving away over £12,000 worth of prizes on 31st December to the best entry in their “Gold For Christmas” competition.  The winner will enjoy one year’s wealth creation coaching with Nicola Cairncross plus many other goodies.  Visit us at http://www.themoneygym.com/blog/goldforxmas/ to find out how to enter.

Your entrant should then add a paragraph about themselves and their entry including their full URL so they enjoy the link benefit from YouTube too.

4. You want them to use the same set of “tag” keywords which you give them (which should also include some tag keywords/phrases that the “most viewed” videos on YouTube in your niche/specialty also use).

All of the above ensures that all the competition entries are shown next to each other in the “Related videos” box hopefully right after some of the most viewed videos in your niche or speciality that are on YouTube already.

5. They must email you when they have uploaded their entry with the URL of their video.  You must check they have done the above properly.

Competition – Setup

Step One – Set Up The Competition Criteria & Prizes.  Decide what you are giving away and what you want people to actually do, to enter.  Write a simple list of instructions or criteria, and keep it short.

Step Two – Start tweeting, mentioning in your blog and ezine, that something big is coming….hint at the value of the prizes and the date the competition will launch.  Do this every day from now until the end of the competition.

Step Three – Set up a YouTube account / channel if you don’t have one and link it to your website.  Either upload some existing video, or favourite some that are relevent to your target market.

Step Four – Set up a blog post explaining the competition, the prizes and tease your readers with anticipation.  Add an email signup box to capture the “eager beavers” and start segmenting the potential entrants.  On the “thank you” landing page, list the instructions on what to do, to enter.

Step Five – On the launch date, send out an email to your list, Twitter like crazy and update your Facebook page with a link to come to your blog to enter their name and email’s to be jumped through to the page where they find out how to enter the competion.

Step Six – Start embedding a video per blog post, to your blog and email the URL to your entrant.  Keep the Blog post name short! Favourite each entry on your YouTube channel.

Step Seven – Get the entrant to get their mates to come and vote for them on your blog via the comments box on their particular post, saying why they should win.  Tell them to tweet, text their friends the URL, talk about it on their Facebook profiles, including their particular link to your site.

Step Eight – When it’s time to judge, count up the votes and then apply any other criteria you want to levy, choose your winner.

Step Nine – Try and make a big event of the announcement – do it live on BlogTalkRadio or ustream.com and broadcast the show details, announce the winner live and get a video made,

Step Ten – Include a “Word From Our Sponsors” kind of promotion, making everyone aware of the product or service that the winner will enjoy, and the URL where everyone else can get theirs!

The Money Gym “Gold For Christmas” Competition

Inspired by one of my mentors, Rich Schefren, as the climax of our online video competition, we held a 12 hour Wealth-A-Thon, covering live chat, live guests, loosely based around a chapter in my book The Money Gym, every hour, showcasing each entrant during the 12 hours and we broadcast the whole day on Ustream, announcing the winner in the last hour, interviewing her live on Ustream after the winner was announced.

In fact, I’ve just reminded myself how cool Ustream is, as I was able to swap between two cameras, my screen, and have a tickertape effect going across the bottom of the camera all day, promoting the competition and our website – I used a bit of software called WebCamMax for that.

Great fun and we never had less than 70 people watching live online, peaking at 200 or so in the hour we announced the winner. And it’s recorded for posterity on Ustream and the entries are on YouTube as well as our blog.

Love to hear your comments via the “Share Your Thoughts” link here, ask your questions, and I want to hear how you get on with your own competitions!

P.S. Debbie Winterbourne won ours and she’s done brilliantly with her year’s mentoring – let me get her to post an update here for you eh?

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