Time for a New Contest?

[Fairy Cardmaker]

I have an idea. Who wants in?!

Contest:
iCraft admin (or their volunteer/designated bloggers) make an iCraft blog post featuring iCraft sellers. The feature will list:

• Seller name + shop link
• Main category(-ies)
• Gifting ideas - what their products would make good gifts for: by person, by event, etc.

With some nice product features.

To "win" anyone who posts a comment on the blog post is entered to win. One entry per person commenting. Random.org can be used to pull up the # of the comment who wins. (iCraft will have to weed out duplicate commenters.)

Winner gets a prize.

Cost to sellers to be featured is a donation to the "prize" basket. Depending how many sellers want to participate, iCraft can decide if there is one prize or more than one prize. For sellers with expensive items (say iCraft sets a $ threshhold of what is an "expensive" item), perhaps your contribution to the prize could be a coupon code for your store for $X off any item. iCraft would have to help arrange how prizes get to the winner (e.g. notify the stores of where to send the thing? Or would the store make a reserved listing for $0 that iCraft admin could "purchase" with the winner's shipping details?)

To keep the blog post to a decent size, we can say limit of X sellers per contest and then we could run another contest later if more than that number of sellers want to participate.

What does iCraft admin think?
What do other sellers think?

Any ideas to add or alter?

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Fairy Cardmaker,

Yes, good idea. We'd be happy to run a contest like this if people are interested.
Should we pick a theme or a holiday for this showcase?

One thing we could do is to ask people to place a comment with the link to our blog on their social media accounts and then mention their accounts in the comments section of our blog. We'd use those comments to verify their shares.
This way we'd generate some traffic from social media to the stores featured in the article. What do you think?

[Fairy Cardmaker]

I'm indifferent to a theme. Yes, social media links are good, but what about people who don't have one? I've seen contests where you can get one entry for commenting but one extra entry for sharing on social media - possibly one per channel you share on.

[iCraft Admin]

Yes, we could count social media shares as extra entries. Good idea!