How do You do Advertising Events?

[Brie 51]

I’ve been looking into various boards for info on this, but I would love to have an advertising event on my board, but I’m not totally sure how to go about it.

 

I don’t want members to just go hog wild and end up double or triple advertising on sites in quick succession, so I was thinking a list with links to the advertisement.

 

How do you run your advertising events? What sort of issues do you see crop up? And what would you do differently next time?

[HotPinkUnicornMess 51]

I don't really know how I'd approach this. I'm not sure I would want to send members out into the 'wild' per se and have them advertise for me. I know most of my members so far, and they are generally cool people. But what happens if one of them gets a little too enthusiastic and advertises in the wrong place, wrong forum, wrong website, or too much? As the administration of my community, I would take responsibility for that action. I represent my site, my members represent my site. Therefore it'd reflect on me and the site if any members, willingly or mistakenly over stepped boundaries. How do I know if members in the advertising event were following the rules everywhere else? What sites would they be advertising on? How do I keep track of it all? What's the incentive for the members in the event (other than the obvious - more people = more activity. What should I reward them with?) 

As much as everyone dislikes being personally responsible for copy/pasta'ing their ads on sites for hours out of a day/week, at least I know me, right? I know I read the ad rules, read the ad forums, try and make sure I put the ad in the correct place and double check my code to see if it works and what not. 

I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. 

[Brie 51]

That’s pretty much my worry. I see plenty of sites doing it Im this time of year, so I know it could be done, but I’ve never actually done it myself and I’m not entirely sure how to make sure players don’t just spam sites/people.

[Sage 289]

I love advertising events. They're easy points/rewards, easy to do, and it's fun to get competitive! And it just benefits the forum. I've never run into any problems running these kinds of events, but you do need to have some ground rules. Here are mine:

• if posting our ad on other forums, you may only post in the appropriate advertising sections.
• if our ad has been double posted on a forum, only the first person to claim it gets the credit. Please respect a forum's advertising rules and don't spam their forums.
• if posting the ad on your own tumblr/twitter/other social media, you can only count ### posts/reblogs/retweets/etc. every day. We don't want to clog people's feeds with our ad and get blocked.

I also do some fun extras to get people outside the usual ad posting. Like:

• posting links to your ads in groups of 10 gives you x1.5 extra points per group of 10.
• posting our ad in site requests on directories are worth x2 extra points per ad.
• personally recruiting a member is worth x5 extra points as normal, and can be added to your ad contest total.
• putting our button in your signature on another site is worth ### points.

Edited May 4, 2019 by Sage

[Rune 1,099]

Make sure they use the same title/description so that a quick search with ctrl F shows if there's already a post there.

 

Including other options, like Sage suggested, such as posting a wanted ad on a resource site, or tumblr is a great way to make the ads different and not overwhelm anyone. 

 

I also suggest doing bulk prizes instead of first, second, third place. For example...

5 ads - Character slot

15 ads - Slightly rare thing.

25 ads - Rare thing or other rare thing

50 ads - Rare thing, Rare character slot or Other Rare Thing

 

Etc. Make it so everyone can get the thing if they want, but one person can't absolutely dominate and ruin everyone else's fun. Alongside this, I'd cap the rewards at 100-300 ads so that people with less time on their hands still stand a chance. One site I was on had a reward for doing 800+ ads and because one person didn't work, they went and did nothing but advertising in the first week or so and made it a pain for anyone else to get anything.