Ideas for the Next John Chow Ad Contest

I emailed John Chow yesterday mentioning how I was thinking about some different creative ways I could use my 125 x 125 ad banner his website. Here are a few of the ideas I thought of:

1. The “Hot Spots” Banner.

This was one of my favorite ideas but unfortunetley John didn’t want to add hotspots to the banner. I can understand that because he would have to make updates to banner often as new advertisers signup etc.

With this idea, I would split the banner into 5 separate ads (each space would be 125 x 18). I’d then sell each spot for $125 a piece. One of the spots would be mine but the other four would be paying my ad costs + $100 extra. Here is an example banner I might have used:

2. A John Chow Ad Raffle.

This is another idea I mentioned to John Chow and the one I decided to go with. However, I didn’t realize that “raffles” are technically only allowed for charities and non-profit organizations unless they are free. Since the contest had only started for a few hours and there had not been a lot of entries yet, I thought it would be best to cancel this one.

With this idea, entries would cost just $10 each. I would select two winners and those winners would both get their banner Ad shown on John Chow for one week. I think this idea had the potential to do fairly well.

3. Free Ad on John Chow.

Basically this would be a contest where I would give away a free one day 125 x 125 banner ad on John Chow to five winners. To qualify, you would simply need to leave a comment into the thread and link back to the contest. Have not worked on the full details but this would be a quick and easy contest.

4. Share an Ad.

With this idea I would create a generic ad for the banner and then sell ad spots on the landing page. I’m not sure if this would work though because I would have to keep the total number of ads on the landing page to a minimum (maybe 6 to 10) and sell them for like $65 a piece to break even.

5. Sell Redirected traffic. I just thought of this idea. I could create a generic ad using the text something like “Click Here for the Cool Site of the Day.” Then I could sell redirected traffic. Because I could change where the traffic redirects to on my end, once setup it would not require any updates John would need to make.

6. Flip the Ad Spot. This is not a new idea used on JohnChow.com but I could always try to resell the spot for a higher price than I paid for it. I’d probably break it up into selling weeks such as $150 for a one week banner spot on John Chow.

What would you do? I’m leaning at just started with the third idea and doing something else when that ends. This would give 5 people the opporunity to get a one day banner ad on John Chow for FREE.

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