Democracy and Blog Contests

The recent Canadian election has got us in a very democratic mood here at www.contestcanada.net. In particular, the issue that has been discussed a couple of times in the past few weeks is the handling of blog contests. In the past, we included them along with regular contests on the main page, but then we separated them onto their own page. The ongoing feedback we’ve been getting is that it would also be good to have an icon or button that clearly indicates that a particular listing is for a blog contest.

And so, after several minutes slaving over an on-line button-generator, this is what we came up with:

You’ll see this button on the site and in the newsletter each day, next to the little flags for Canada and the US.

Another thing that we’ve been hearing quite a bit lately is that some folks really don’t like the contests where you have to submit a photo or essay and then get your friends to vote for you. There are more and more of these in recent times as companies jump on the social media bandwagon. Sometimes these contests have pretty amazing prizes, so we definitely want to continue listing them. As John pointed out in a recent comment, “Sometimes the contests that require a little effort mean that the odds are that much better!”

So, in an effort to please everyone, we’ve added a button to clearly identify this type of contest:

And, lastly, because some people don’t like Facebook contests, we’ve added a button for that too. This is usually (but not always) pretty obvious from the contest URL, but an extra visual indicator can’t hurt:

One last thing on the subject of Blog Contests: My Little Review Corner has a new entry in a series of posts meant to explain the ins and outs of blog contests. This one is about Tweeting. Check it out.

Hopefully you’ll find the new buttons to be helpful. If you have suggestions on how this could be improved, please feel free to comment below. Or if you’d rather not make a public comment, you can also send a message through our contact form.