Competitions are a great way to promote your website, drive traffic and increase sales. But the thought of running one on your site can be daunting. Don’t worry! There are plenty of WordPress competitions plugins that can help you set up and run a variety of contests and giveaways.
In this article we’ll look at what you stand to gain if you run a competition and the different types of competitions that you could offer on your site. More importantly, we look at the top 10 WordPress competition plugins that you can use to help you get started.
Why You Should Run Competitions on Your WordPress Website
There are many reasons why you should run competitions on your WordPress website. Competitions are fun, they are a great way of engaging with your community and they can increase interactions on your site. Followers sharing your competitions on social media also help promote your site and raise brand awareness.
Competitions contribute to driving traffic to your site. Not only will visitors be encouraged to return to your website to check out your competitions, the contests will also bring new visitors. Thus growing your audience and helping to generate leads.
Lastly, competitions can help you promote your products and increase sales. You can use your products in a competition, getting people to vote on them or share pictures of them, or give them away as prizes. As interest grows in the competitions, and more people visit your site, the more chance you have of making sales.
Video Contest WordPress Plugin
The premium Video Contest WordPress Plugin will easily help you organize and run a video competition on your website. Watching and sharing videos, especially on social media, draws much attention. A video competition is a great way to create excitement around your products and brand, and reach a wider audience.
Video Contest WordPress Plugin has a powerful admin panel and is very user-friendly. So even someone with basic WordPress knowledge can get a competition up and running on their site. You can also reset and relaunch a new competition quickly and easily. With this plugin, regular competitions can become commonplace in your marketing strategy.
Wishpond Social Contests
Wishpond Social Contests is a responsive plugin that provides a range of options for running competitions. However, this feature rich plugin also offers social share buttons, landing pages, email marketing and real-time analytics – everything you need to run a competition, help your content get shared on social media and grow your audience.
Using Wishpond Social Contests will allow you to set up a variety of different competitions on your site. From sweepstakes, photo, video and music competitions to Instagram hashtag and Pinterest contests, to name but a few. An easy drag-and-drop builder is provided to help you set up the competitions and contests can be published and promoted on your Facebook page.
This plugin doesn’t come cheap at $45 a month, but with all its extra features it is definitely a solution worth considering.
Opinion Stage
Opinion Stage is a free WordPress competition plugin that allows you to create and run beautiful and interesting quizzes, polls, surveys and forms. These help drive traffic to your website by engaging with your audience and encouraging social media sharing. This type of competition can also help you discover the opinions of your target audience and capture leads.
The competitions run by Opinion Stage look professional and are extremely fun and interactive. They can be easily customized, embedded in different locations and a brand logo can be added. Votes and answers are taken care of by the plugin, and emails and social profiles are collected. This plugin offers a great way to build a busy community on your website and social media pages.
Photo Contest WordPress Plugin
Photo Contest WordPress Plugin has been created to help people run a photo contest on their WordPress website. Viewers react well to images and creating a competition using photos is a great way to pique interest and encourage audience participation.
The Photo Contest WordPress Plugin encourages people to vote on photos, and share them. This helps engage your audience and reach new potential clients. This plugin runs the competition for you, tallying votes and selecting the winner. Easy to setup and use, this plugin can be purchased at a one off price of $41.
InviteBox
InviteBox lets you set up and run a referral program on your website. A refer-a-friend competition is an impressive way of attracting new viewers who are more likely to be interested in your products or website niche.
InviteBox boasts it can add a referral program to your site in minutes. You can then select a reward of your choosing for those that refer a friend. This can vary from a coupon or discount code for eCommerce stores to revealing hidden content or an eBook for blogs InviteBox also enables you to reward those who share your content on social media or refer a set number of friends, amongst other things.
SoundCloud Sound Competition
The free SoundCloud Sound Competition WordPress plugin enables you to host multiple audio or remix competitions on your website. Integrated with SoundCloud, all the remixes are stored there so you don’t have to worry about storage space. It also supports Facebook voting, but you will have to upgrade to a premium package for this.
Setting up a SoundCloud competition is relatively straightforward but does take a little while. After installing the plugin you will need to create an app in SoundCloud and then add code to your site. However, there are some in-depth video tutorials to help you with this process.
ContestFriend for WordPress
ContestFriend for WordPress is a free competition plugin created to help you grow your email list with viral social contests. Using this plugin is a quick and simple way to run contests, sweepstakes and giveaways. ContestFriend is also very customizable, so it can be altered to match the image of your site and brand.
ContestFriend is fully responsive and lets you run unlimited contests with unlimited entries. It has a weighted entry system to reward users for sharing and you can add your own rules and disclaimers if needs be. A great plugin for those just starting out running competitions.
WP Contest Creator
WP Contest Creator is a premium competition plugin. This impressive solution offers a variety of customizable contests and is a great choice for the larger websites out there. Other features of WP Contest Creator range from automated and scheduled competitions to social sharing customization and mailing list integration with popular providers.
WP Contest Creator provides analytics to help you track and manage your competitions, as well as collect leads. Competitions are easy to set up and are all automatically managed so once a contest goes live you can relax. WP Contest Creator isn’t cheap, at $99 for a single domain. But for those that can afford it, it is worth its price tag.
Football Pool
The Football Pool plugin needs little explanation. This free WordPress competition plugin adds a fantasy sports pool to your website. It allows your viewers to play against each other, predict outcomes of matches and earn points.
This plugin installs custom tables and information from the 2016 UEFA European Championships but can be easily altered to cater for other championships or sports.
ShowDown
ShowDown is a fun plugin that should resonate with your audience and help increase engagement and drive traffic. You can display photos, products or videos in a battle scenario. Then ask your audience to choose yes or no, vote on a scale of 1-10 or select their favorite image.
The plugin runs the competition for you, taking care of the votes, displaying the results and showing the winning photo of each battle. Competitions also can be customized to suit your site and audience. This plugin can be purchased for the very affordable price of $23.
Final Thoughts
Before you select a plugin and start running a competition, think carefully about what your goals are. Why are you running the competition and what are you hoping to achieve? Also consider the type of website you run and what your audience will respond to.
Once you have your competition objectives clear in your head it will be easier to decide which type of competition you should run, and what competition plugin you should install.
Have you run a competition on your website? What plugin did you use? Did the competition help your site achieve its goals? Please share your experiences in the comments below…
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