David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

He's everywhere - he's got an incredibly popular website, he's got some books and he's been on TV both on his own show and as a consultant.

I recently launched a site and decided to offer a prize draw for newsletter subscribers. Things were going horribly (with around 30 people subscribed) until the middle of September when a Money Saving Expert forum member stumbled across the site.
 
Whilst the traffic has been nowhere near Rob's traffic from the main site, it has been fruitful.

469 visitors have visited in 2 weeks with approximately 3/4 of them becoming newsletter subscribers. Also, the sales generated by this traffic has covered the prize value.

The forum topic wasn't seeded by, or contributed to by myself although I have monitored it. The person who seeded the topic did mention it was a new site and despite this I've got nearly 500 unique visitors from the mighty MSE. Not to mention the link is a dofollow link so hopefully there'll be some associated benefits too!

With regards to the newsletter, each email address is validated and is checked to see if it can receive emails. If it can, a validation email is sent out which requires clicking to activate a membership. This ensures spam bots and automated competition entry bots are somewhat restricted (although the terms and conditions have a provision for these) and it ensures that people receive a newsletter in exchange for a competition entry.

As for prizes, I have taken to buying my own. This is a risky strategy but this first competition has been fruitful in providing 300 (ish) newsletter subscribers and doubling of last month's unique visitor count, whilst providing a handful of affiliate sales. As the site grows I'm looking towards asking merchants for sponsorship deals (prizes in exchange for exposure) but I need a solid membership base and reliable traffic stats first.