Hey guys, I'm talking to my programmer guy about building something that can be used to facilitate future giveaways. I'm thinking it would go like this.

Each month there would be a "Giveaway Pot". We could come up with a fun name for this, but essentially, every time someone submits a review, $5 goes into the pot. This would be automatically calculated and would show on every review page and of course some other pages. (Review pages are the most trafficked pages on the site and nearly 80% of all traffic comes into the site on the individual review pages through searches on the search engines).

As the month goes on, and folks submit reviews, the pot grows. On the last day of the month, we pull a name from the database from someone who is:

a) Registered in the forums - and -
b) Who submitted a review during that month

The winner gets a gift card in the value of the pot.

The goal here is obviously to drive reviews, but I'm hoping that the idea of the "growing pot" would have sort of the same effect as the powerball when it starts to take off. Obviously this could be risky as I don't think I could afford $5000 every month, but honestly if there are that many reviews being submitted, I'm guessing the site traffic is going to go up proportionately.

What do you guys think of this idea? Do you think it will help drive review submissions?

Money always attracts people, and It can't hurt to try. Don't be shortsighted: I worked for a guy in music store who decided to offer one free lesson to new students if they agreed to pay for four in advance. At the last minute, he chickened out because he was afraid too many people would sign up and he'd lose money. He didn't take into account that increased traffic in the store would lead to other sales or that new students would recommend the store to their friends. Even if he'd had 100 people sign up, he'd have "lost" only about $1500 by paying teachers for free lessons, but he'd have made $6000 in prepaid lessons that he didn't have before, and he wouldn't have had to chase down people who "forgot" to pay for lessons.

If somehow someone wins $5000, you can alsways discontinue the contest.

I'd do it for a more nominal value, say, $2 or $3 to try it. Unless you'd like to do it for $5. Already, just with reviews from the moderators, you'd have $30, which I guess isn't bad, but if it's representative of the rest of the population, well, you could be looking at up to $200 a month for that. You'd know more about that than I would, though.

Thanks guys. Dave, great example there and Shack - I think I can afford $5 to start based on holiday sales. Maybe we try it for a couple months and monitor. As Dave noted, we can always drop it. It just amazes me that we have 5 to 6 thousand people a day come through here and we get very few reviews. Maybe I need to look at ease of the process too, but I don't want to be another one of those 2 sentence review sites..

Maybe you could think about putting a cap on it. Find out what you can afford to give away and then make sure it doesn't go above that. I don't think it would discourage reviews. If its $1,000 or $2,000 or whatever the number, you could set that as a goal. Just an idea.

Yeah, that's true. Let me think on it. Doesn't seem like it's going to be a problem though. LOL. Hardly any reviews so far this month.