Offering Incentive to New Members, The GOOD vs BAD?

[sethriley]

Hey guys,

First I just wanted to say thank you for making me feel so welcome here as a new member.

I started an Internet Marketing forum to help newbies get started online. I have very little activity on my forum, so I started running a monthly giveaway event to encourage members to ask questions. I offer them a pretty hefty prize for winning the event.

However, no one will post!

I was hoping you guys could check out my forum and share your thoughts about how you feel my forum appears to you when you first visit it.

In exchange for my opinion about your forum...

You can view my forum in my signature.

To our success,

-Seth Riley

 

[LeadCrow]

Prizes dont motivate people to post more than necessary. They also deter people from referring friends or sharing awareness of contests (to maximize their chances of winning).

I had this friend who set 2 contest with large prize bundles, and despite publicity and very short-lived interest, all he got out of it was no more than 200 posts and a few thousand dollars out his pocket. No quotes available, but I believe he swore off the practice forever.


For sites basing their viability on stockpiling knoweldge, ressources, guides or useful articles, promotions could be as simple as just offering increased access to limited content or content kept off limits. This might not map appropriately to forums though, more for regular websites focusing on readership rather than user contributions.

 

[sethriley]

Prizes dont motivate people to post more than necessary. They also deter people from referring friends or sharing awareness of contests (to maximize their chances of winning).

I actually didn't even think about that. I have been so busy trying to make everything perfect sometimes commonsense flies out the window. I will be thinking about this very carefully, although with the IM niche it is a little different then a lot of Niches. People love getting free stuff in my niche. However, I need to rethink my strategies and come up with a giveaway event that could benefit all the members and not just one if I continue to run them.

I like the idea of granting them exclusive access to a private forum such as video training or a more complex money making opportunity.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.

 

[LeadCrow]

It may be as easy as offering access to a free premium ebook in exchange for signing up to a newsletter. Freebies can be non-exclusive (rather than limited in the number of recipients), since the niche is about sharing valuable information in the first place.
Creating and manipulating scarcity works wonders, especially for promotional uses and contests whose result announcing is not immediate -giving you time to sell that promotion's visibility rather than gamble without a way to guarantee a minimum returns).

 

[sethriley]

That's why in the details I explain that I will need at least 5 contributors that post 5 times for the event to take place, this will ensure a ROI that I could live with.

However, I am so excited about my forum. In a way, I just wanted to give something away to my members to show my willingness to be generous. I wanted to post the results somewhere in the forum. I believe that would encourage members and help them understand the potentiel they have to make money using my methods.

Ebooks are so played out and everybody and their mother gives them away for free. I wanted to do something different, that offers real value. I personally have never made money from an ebook and I doubt many of my members have either. But that being said i'm sure it would help my registration conversions.

 

[Akela]

Providing a tangible reward for a potentially enjoyable activity reduces one's enjoyment thereof - otherwise known as turning play into work.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/31/3/479/
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/71/1/1.short
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1980.tb00961.x/abstract