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How to Create and Host Competitions on Your WordPress Website

There’s no better way to generate engagement and direct interactivity with your target audience/ market than hosting a competition on your WordPress website. The better your rewards, the higher is the input from your audience. But on all scales of prizes/ rewards, hosting competitions is lucrative for your business and WordPress website in the long run.

How? It can provide exponential growth in terms of your subscriber count (email list building), audience and traffic growth (great incentives to draw in new relevant visitors to your website), social media engagement metrics (brilliantly marketed competitions are trees that keep on giving time on and on), and brand image and awareness in general (previously unmotivated/ uninterested/ inactive audience members can be drawn with relevant competitions and rewards).

Competitions are also great for promoting your own products and services if you can create it around one of them. For instance, a UX Wireframing or prototyping tool can base an entire competition around the best wireframe or the best use of one of the ‘supposedly’ trickier features within the tool.

While all that’s very attractive and you’re probably looking for stuff to create your online competition on right now, you need to address a few concerns – You need to pick the right and relevant product/ service/ subject (for your brand and image), advertise the competition itself (optional), and make sure that your WordPress website servers can handle the traffic estimates.

Once all that’s cleared, you can take a look at one of the following plugins for creating and hosting different types of competitions on your WordPress website:

Photo Contest Plugin

Available at: CodeCanyon.net  

Price: $41

User Rating: 4.1/5

This amazing Photo contest creator plugin is the answer to all your functionality needs if you’re going to create a contest around photography and let your audience pick the winners with user ratings.

Photo Contest plugin is an easy-to-install, Multilanguage capable, and highly SEO optimized plugin with a great administration panel and ability to create and host unlimited Picture contests at the same time. You can set Vote frequency (time allotted for counters to refresh), in-contest categories, four separate layers of user voting security – IP address, JavaScript enabled browser, Cookie authentication, and optional User ID (site registration). You can restrict voting based on WordPress user roles (registered members only or all visitors), set a limit on max. number of images uploaded by a contestant, select gallery display parameters, and more.

The plugin is also compatible with WordPress Disqus comments, has email notification feature, shortcodes and custom widgets, and perfect compatibility with BuddyPress.

Truly this is all you need for a successful picture-photo based contest.

Video Contest Plugin

Available at: CodeCanyon.net  

Price: $36

User Rating: 4/5

From the same creators who brought you Photo Contest Plugin mentioned above, here’s the Video Contest equivalent.

Video Contest WordPress plugin will let create and host a video contest on your WordPress website. It’s an easy to install, multilingual ready, highly responsive and SEO optimized video contest plugin. It’s packed with great features that let you moderate videos before they’re displayed for voting, limit number of videos per contestant, five security layers during video upload – IP address, JavaScript enabled, PHP, Cookie authentication, and User ID (registered on your website).

It has easy contest reset and re-launch features, along with options to edit video titles/ captions. It comes with a voting system, shortcodes, and widgets. The plugin is fully compatible with BuddyPress.

Wishpond Social Contests

Available at: wordpress.org  

Price: $45

WishPond Social Contests is a good little plugin, even though it’s seemingly abandoned by the developer who created it (hasn’t been updated in over 9 months). The plugin lets you create a social sharing contest on Facebook and Twitter which can drive your social media engagement metrics absolutely to the moon and beyond. The premises is simple – You create a post (picture/ video/ or simple text) and ask your followers to share it. The plugin will monitor your contest in real time and can be set to automatically pick a random winner from sharers.

InviteBox

Available at: wordpress.org  

Another simple (but freemium) contest creator plugin is InviteBox, the free (and feature crippled) version of which can be downloaded from WordPress.org plugin Repository.

The plugin works on the premises of referral rewards and creates a competition around that. This helps you gain more registered users/ subscribers/ conversions/ social media followers/ what have you for your brand. With InviteBox you can easily create, manage, and oversee a referral contest on your WordPress website.

Endnote

Looks like its all rainbows and sunshine for those who can successfully create and complete a competition on their WordPress websites, right? But it takes some real effort on the site administrator team’s part to oversee uploads, counts, and prevent fraudulent counts/entries from spoiling everything. Make sure to follow through the best security and performance guidelines to make a good impression on all the new traffic you’re generating through the WordPress competition, and you’re golden.

Author Bio

Tracey Jones is an exuberant professional and WordPress customization expert for HireWPGeeks Ltd., a top-notch company providing WordPress development services to our clients across the globe. Instead of this, she is also interested in writing information-rich blogs and articles regarding web design and development trends in the market.