With the hiking series of stories in the books, it’s time for the winner of the contest.
Though I had hoped to get many entries for this signed book of Skywalker’s trip on the Appalachian, only three people entered. Two tweeted the contest, too, so that’s five entries. Add two more who gave a Facebook page like (thanks, you two!) and we have a total of seven entries.
That’s disappointing.
Still, for those three people, the odds got that much better to win this book. First, if you haven’t read the book, it’s a fantastic story of — as Skywalker told me through Twitter — on what not to do on the Appalachian Trail. He makes fun of himself and tells about the trip in a humorous and colorful way.
I highly recommend the book to those of you who either didn’t win this contest or are just reading about it now.
Anyway, with so few entries, it didn’t take me to pop the four into Random.org’s randomizer to get a winner.
And the winner is…
Lauren!
Congrats, Lauren. Contact me with your address and I’ll get the book out to you sometime next week!
The winner via random.org.
The hiking series
I hope people enjoyed the hiking series. Though I would have liked to have had a few other hikers (I contacted several, but didn’t hear back from all of them), I am happy with how the series worked out.
There were some really cool stories and I liked getting back into that style of writing. I hope to do a few more things like this with the blog down the line. I have some ideas I’m working on, so we’ll see how it goes.
The links below are for all of the stories in the series. Go check ’em out if you haven’t already!
Series Schedule:
- October 16: Win an autographed copy of Bill Walker’s book about his Appalachian Trail hike
- October 17: Preview
- October 19: Emily Harper
- October 22: Chris Nadeau
- October 24: Tyler Bedick
- October 28: Bill Walker
- Today: Wrap and contest winner announced
The future of contests at A ‘lil HooHaa
I’m not sure if I’ll be running contests much anymore. Though I like the idea, it hasn’t done what the hope is — drive some traffic to the blog so people read it. Even through social media “advertising,” I don’t get many extra hits. And many who enter the contest only enter and move on. Even though tweeting it (if one has a Twitter account) is a quick and easy way to get a second entry. Same with liking the page on Facebook.
I’ll reconsider as I go on, but it doesn’t seem like the contests do too well, so I’m going to save myself the shipping costs (most things I’ve given away, I already have or have been donated). If I do another series or two of stories and somebody gives me something to give away, I’ll try again. But for now, I’m not going to have any standalone contests anymore. Which, to be honest, is too bad because I had some cool things (things I have gathered personally over the last year or two like t-shirts, geocoins etc.) that I was going to give away. I’ll re-visit it down the line, but for now it doesn’t seem like a feature I’ll keep doing.
Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook by clicking the button on the right side of the page!
My experience with contests is that it takes a couple to really generate any traffic worth noting, I did 4 before I started getting any spike in hits at all other than regular traffic, but then if you don’t do regular contests, they fall back off again unless you hook them on your awesomness LOL
Jonna (aka tattooedmommie) recently posted..Perspective
Jonna — while I agree with that, my contests were barely getting entries from people who read my blog on a normal basis. And I had a bunch of other things to give away. But if I am only going to get four entries (well, four people) entering a contest, it’s not worth me putting out the money for postage and everything else. I just can’t justify it. I had a light-up frisbee contest where the disc was worth 25 bucks (and cost like 6 bucks to ship). I got five people to enter. Given the frisbee was donated, thankfully, but the end doesn’t justify everything else.
I’ll still do them in certain occasions when merited, but I am not going to do them on a regular basis as planned. I didn’t expect a lot of traffic, but at least a few more entries would have made me want to continue etc.