Speed Demons

Contest Machine is experiencing some heavy load right now, so we're making a few upgrades to ensure a fast and friendly experience for all of our contest runners and entrants. We may have a few moments of downtime in the next 24 hours -- but you probably won't notice :) and our site should be fast and snappy again soon. Thanks for your support and happy new year!

Testimonials Page

Do you have any good testimonials for us regarding your contestmachine experience? Check out our new testimonials page here http://contestmachine.com/site/testimonials and add yours by emailing us at info [@] contestmachine.com. Thanks and happy holidays!

Check out our Tour

We just posted a tour of ContestMachine's basic functionality. Check it out! Should answer most of your questions too.

Some updates and RSS feeds

So we've been making lots of updates in response to feature requests and bug reports. The list of ideas and potential integrations with other services keeps growing every day. If you have suggestions please send them to us, so we can prioritize what we should work on. ;)

One feature that users have wanted for a while is the ability to 'close' promotions easily, especially if you've received a winner's mailing address directly through email. You'll find that it's now easy to set a prize as delivered, and when all prizes are delivered, the promotion closes. This should help users who have promotions 'stuck' on the active tab.

We also have added and tweaked several RSS feeds on our Live page that let you keep up with current promotions and winners on our network. Here they are as links:

Live - Ending Soonest - RSS

Live - Newest - RSS

Live - Top Ten by Entries - RSS

Live - Recent Winners - RSS

Live - Random - RSS

Let us know what you need, and thanks again for your support!

Our Best Suggestion Giveaway

Prepping for Launch

Welcome to ContestMachine.com.

We've been in an exclusive private beta for several months, and we recently opened our gates to all. I'm just going to answer a few questions about what we do.

Q: At a basic level, what does ContestMachine do?

A: We make it easy for anyone to run a contest or giveaway online. Just create your promotion, add a prize, and you're good to go.

Q: So who are your customers?

A: Right now, our customer base is mostly composed of Beauty Bloggers who receive free items from different cosmetics and beauty products companies. Before ContestMachine, they would run giveaways featuring these items in comments on their blogs. This is always tough, as comment forms were never designed for contests. In comments, it's hard to manage a large number of entries, "randomly" pick a winner, and conceal entry information (to name just a few issues). With ContestMachine, beauty bloggers can now run full-fledged promotions inside colorful widgets that they embed on their sites. Some of our customers have run giveaways with several dozen prizes -- and ContestMachine automatically chooses winners, sends emails, and collects mailing addresses and verifications -- all with just a few clicks.

Q: Why Beauty Bloggers?

A: Well, it turns out that we knew a beauty blogger, Henna, who runs CanadianBeauty.com. She installed the first ContestMachine widget, and the rest is history. None of our features are specific to this genre of blogs -- it just turned out to be a great initial use-case.

Q: Why are you better than a comment form, again?

A: A couple things.

• You can conceal the information you want to protect. For example, let's say you wanted to run a giveaway where you asked users to find out a particular fact and then submit it as a contest entry. You could stop users snooping on answers submitted by others using our "hide entry response" feature.
  
• You can disqualify entries, automatically select as many winners from the entrants as prizes, and collect mailing addresses so you can mail out your prizes. We also divide a contest into six stages so you can track everything from start to finish, and you can export the data when you're done.
• Participation increases. Site owners typically see their entries jump from dozens in blog comments to hundreds and even thousands in our widget -- and they're much easier to browse and manage.
  

Q: What's the email opt-in feature?

A: This feature adds an "opt-in" checkbox just before the submit button, that says, "Subscribe to Updates." Using this feature, site owners can collect names and emails that they can then add to their own mailing lists. End-users like this feature because the box is not checked by default, and site owners like this feature because they get a list of people willing to receive direct email about their site.

Q: Why the promotions arena? It seems like a gimmicky place.

A: We think there are legitimate reasons to run a good-faith contest or giveaway, and those are the kinds of promotions we support. We don't automatically sign anyone up for an email list, and we try to keep our user interface as simple and non-gimmicky as possible. The widgets display entries, and when the promotion is over, we list the winners. How many sweepstakes did you enter and never hear from again? Did anyone win?

Q: What is your long-term vision?

A: We see ContestMachine morphing in to a place where site owners can connect with product companies willing to give away prizes. Right now, companies haphazardly browse the Internet looking for bloggers that they can give products to -- we seek to change that.

Please give ContestMachine a try and let us know what you think! Thanks!

- Savraj