[housebg]

I was reading some older threads on Contests and Giveaways, and then did some searching for what Loxly referred to as the "mommybloggers" running contests.

I'm finding a lot of example of these giveaways, where they ask you to leave a comment on the blog and then give you additional entries for things like following on twitter, adding a button to your blog, liking on facebook, etc.

How in the world is someone tracking all this? I've seen some wordpress plugins that let you pick the winner from comments - but how are they tracking all these other entries?

And lastly, what have you done that has been successful? A certain type of promotion, using a particular software?

I think there is value here for driving traffic and potentially site / brand awareness, so looking for any best practices you can share...

[Chuck Hamrick]

housebg, its difficult tracking something like this unless you require some sort of sign-up to win. Overall you can weigh the increase in unique visitors with an analytic package like Google Analytics.

[trienthusiast]

I have a question about contests too. I would like to randomly select a winner from one of my facebook fans... but how can you get the whole list ?

[gocrazy]

When you do a contest, you should prepare a participants list. If it is in Facebook, you should add the participants when you get 200 likes to the excel and save it. When the list is finished (contest registration is over), just use the random digits generator (you can find one free at random.org) to select the winner number. The number of your excel row with the name will be the winner. That's really easy.

[Chuck Hamrick]

I did that in 2001 for a contest with 5000, worked very well.