It’s very tempting to run a contest on your blog or website. It’s an easy way to draw in traffic, you can do it fairly cheaply and contests promote themselves. Well, I’m here to teach you my Inverse Proportionality Law of Internet Contests which can help you run a better contest on your blog. Let’s just call it Carl’s Law for short.

The law states that every internet contest has many pairs of variables that are inversely proportional. That basically means when one thing goes up, the other must come down. Let’s examine some of these pairs.

Number of Entrants vs. Complexity: This one is quite logical. The harder you make it to enter, the less people who will enter. That’s why those lame e-mail address harvesting “enter your e-mail address and win a free iPod” ads used to work so well. It was so simple to enter! True, there was no real prize but that’s hardly the point.

Simplicity vs. Benefit to Website Owner: I wish I could run a contest that required everyone to subscribe to my RSS feed, send me a website to review and post my banner on their website. That would be enormously helpful to me as a blog owner. Unfortunately that makes the contest complicated. And a complicated contest won’t have many entrants to it because most people won’t go through all that trouble. Keep your contest as simple as possible. Only go for one goal at a time. Subscribe to your RSS feed? Fine. Post a link back? Fine. Do both? Not fine. Too much. It’s less benefit to you in the short run but in the long run you’ll get more people looking at your website.

Prize Value vs. Potential Complexity: If you’ve got a car to give away you can make your entrants jump through a million hoops. If you’re giving away $10, you’re not going to have much luck getting people to do all sorts of crazy things. Prize value is not an absolute thing. If have a contest with a free snowboard as the prize I won’t get nearly the response or benefit that a blog focusing on winter sports would have even though the prize has the same monetary value. When in doubt, everyone likes cash. Cash is good.

Ease of Entry vs. Reader Retention: A website I visit frequently is Engadget. They run contests in which all you have to do is leave a comment in a thread. Very simple. They’ve got millions of visitors a month and don’t have to worry about people forgetting about their contests. My website isn’t nearly on the same scale. If I require someone to comment on my post to enter a contest they’re not likely to return. It’s just too easy to forget. In this case we need to strike a balance. Making someone e-mail me with their favorite post from my website would make them think a little and is simple to do. If they think about my website, they’re more likely to return.

Contest Frequency vs. Difficulty of Entry: I alluded to this in the previous post. But if you have good frequent contests, you can make it as simple as possible to enter. People will keep coming back to see when your new contest is starting. This is how Engadget gets away with such simple contests, people will keep coming back to check when they happen. I personally can’t afford a weekly contest of any real value, so entering my contests just can’t be that simple.

Conclusion: Running a internet contest is a balancing act. You must balance things like ease of entry, prize value and benefit to yourself. Think of what benefit you’re trying to achieve and go backwards. My current contest is very simple, it’s meant to advertise my website to people who would benefit from it (webmasters, bloggers) and it offers something these people want. I’m sure I’ll get dozens of entries, each of which can potentially draw in new visitors who might be interested in a review site written by a cranky man. If you want to make your contest really complicated and have a high benefit to you (like people signing up for Adsense with your referral code) you’ve got to make it really worth the time, energy and commitment it takes to enter. Give away $10,000 and you can have people do anything.