How to Create a Contest on Squidoo

The #1 reason to create a contest is to raise awareness and money for charity.

In my opinion, Squidoo is the penultimate way for charities to increase awareness about their cause, raise money, get more members and even increase member involvement.

People can donate (painlessly & effortlessly) to a charity of their choice. ANYONE can set up a "lens" about ANYTHING (for FREE) and have the royalties earned by the lens automatically paid to their charity. They can donate any portion of the royalties too. They choose the amount. Can you imagine what just 1,000 or 10,000 people with a lens making just $10/each a month could do for your favorite charity, month in and month out?

Want to help a charity? Then create a contest to build lenses for it. Won't that feel good?

Here are 6 steps to creating a successful contest on Squidoo. Each step is hot-linked to the details further down the page.

Step 1: Define Purpose

Step 2: Plan It

Step 3: Create the Contest lens

Step 4: Promote the contest

Step 5: Run the contest

Step 6: Announce the winners

The first step is to refine your purpose for having a contest. Take a blank piece of paper and write down 1 simple sentence that describes your purpose for holding a contest. For instance the purpose of my Challenge for Animals contest was...

Example Purpose:

A contest to help raise awareness and money
for 7 small animal rescue charities.

With this clearly written purpose, it was easy to figure out how to approach the rest of steps. I also used it in the introduction of the contest lens itself and in recruiting people to make lenses and in promotions. In my mind, it is the single most important thing you can do to make it all happen.

The magic is in the purpose!

"If you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there?"

Don't even think about skipping this step. Planning is essential to creating and running a successful contest. So, before you even get the url for your Squidoo contest lens, you need to do some planning and make some decisions. See Planning check-list below.

Many lensmasters, who are creating lenses for charity, do not care if there are prizes or not. However, I believe that some type of recognition is welcomed and in my opinion warranted.

We always hear about the spammers and the "bad" folks around. Here we have a chance to recognize and spread the word that there are wonderful folks doing neat things.

Besides some of the prizes or incentives could end up increasing the traffic to the participants lenses, therefore, raising more awareness and money for their charity and/or themselves.

Everybody wins!

The following badges were created specifically for the SquidActivists October Challenge for Animals by ComfortDoc, an incredibly giving Lensmaster.

1st, 2nd, and 3rd place get their own badge and all of the other contestants get a badge too. The idea is that the contestants post the badge on the winning or competing lens linking back to the contest lens.

Running the contest simply means doing whatever it takes to keep the contest lens updated. For instance during the contest, you need to add the new lenses to the appropriate plexo and any other places info should be put. For instance, in the Animal contest, here's what I had:

1. A ENTER THE CONTEST HERE using a Guestbook module. For instance, in the case of the animal contest, I had 2 plexos for lenses depending on the criteria.

2. I also had a KEEPING SCORE... to show readers what lenses donated to which charities. It was created using a TextWrite module.

3. And, I added the lensmaster to the WALL OF FAME which was done using a Featured Lensmaster module.

Creating a new group for a contest may be a good way to get more participation and it gives everyone in the contest another link.

However, there may already be an appropriate group lens. For instance, when I run another animal charity contest, I will use the same group Squidoo Activist's Animal Charities for the lenses that donate 100% to the animal charities, but I may create another one for the lenses donating less or find one(s) that are already created and let folks know them.

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Copyright 2008-2012 Frankie Kangas All rights reserved.