Freebies in exchange for advertising?

Do you want to drive traffic towards your website? There are many ways you can do this. You can spend money advertising on AdWords. You can pay a pane to fly a banner of your website across your town. You could even write to all the papers and try to get a press release about it. Or you can promise the chance of winning a freebie in return for the promotion.

This is just what Productivity501 is doing down at their iPod Shuffle Giveaway. Bloggers all around the world are being encouraged to write a review of their website and they will be entered into a draw where they could win an iPod Shuffle!

So, what are the mechanics behind this. Well they are asking for a 300 word review about their website, containing a minimum of 4 links back to the website, one to the main page, one to the contest and 2 to any articles posted on the blog. They are asking for fair opinions on their blog which could be positive or negative which is nice. At least they aren’t asking for any bias in the reviews. Bloggers are then to post a comment on the page pointing at their review and they will be added into the competition.

So how this compare to other ways or promoting your site online. Obviously there’s the cost of he prize; but this is meagre in return to the positive benefits they are looking for. They will run the competition until they have 150 blogs pointing at their site and this can be invaluable as far as Search Engine ranking can go. Just to put things in perspective, getting listed on Yahoo!’s Directory costs US$299 and then you’re not even guaranteed a place. Getting a total of 600 links from all over the blogosphere is more valuable than that in my opinion.

Interesting advertising model. I might try it sometime.

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