Ambrand.com

Envelopes ready to go…

Would you like some free money? Of course you would. Well I’m offering you - the reader - a chance to win one of three actual brown envelopes containing a EUR 5 note.

How do I enter?
Just write a post over at your blog - and link to this url in the post as
http://www.ambrand.com/2006/05/15/free-money/

(no google bomb necessary!) The pingback will automagically act as your entry, it’ll appear here within 24 hours once moderated, should it not appear then you probably have disabled the feature, turn it on and try again! (wow using a pingback as a method of entering a competition, how innovative, you saw it here first.)

Why am I doing it?
Like every website I want to have as many visitors as possible, I could engage in SEO techniques or spend the budget of a small country on adwords, but really it’s an experiment.
I’ll see (inter alia)

• How many blogs link to this post? (this will show how many real - not robot - readers I have)
• How much will traffic increase?
• How long will the surge last?

This sounds too good to be true, tell me more?

• It’ll cost you nothing to enter - (unless you’re using dialup to edit your blog!)
• I’m not asking for a postal address unless you win (so this isin’t a subtle mailing list generation exercise like most newspaper competitions!)
• I’ll receive your entry by pingback (and not email, so you know I’m not making a mailing list!)
• I’d appreciate if the receiver confirmed on their blog that the envelope did indeed contain cash, possibly with a photo, so future readers will know this wasn’t a joke.

Small print
Terms and conditions do apply: I’m not a transnational corporation with limitless funds, indeed I’m only spending EUR 15, plus postage. Your postal address can be in any country. The winner will be selected at random on Monday 22nd May 2006. I’ll email the winner at the address on their blog, and they must reply by 24th May 2006 with their postal address. If they don’t do so, then another winner will be selected. I won’t use your postal address for anything other then printing the envelope label. The blog name, URL, person name (if it is displayed on their blog) of the winners will be posted here, and with the city/town, state and country name portion only of their address. I reserve the right to cancel the competition, or end it early (No I don’t plan on doing that! but just in case). If you don’t want to enter I’d really like to know why.
Winners
It’s now 22nd May 2006 (the end of the competition). The winners are

• Damien Mulley (Damien Mulley) of Cork, IE
• Dave’s Rants (David O’Neill) of Cork, IE
• Tuppenceworth (Simon McGarr) of Dublin, IE

I’ve emailled these folks, and they have until 24/05/06 to let me know their postal addresses, so I can address the envelopes. I was just going to use their firstnames, but in all cases they have their fullnames in the “public sphere” already on their blogs.

On 24/05/06 I posted the three envelopes

How were the winners selected?
In keeping with the online nature of the competition I decided to use a random number generator, looking in google I quickly found one, and by editing the URL it was instructed to generate three numbers (or integers, to use the terminology) in the one to six range. It returned

Conclusion

• Amount of money was too low: Only six entered, no entrant went to the trouble of creating another fake blog for the purposes of entering twice, one winner had to be emailed twice to get an address, so I conclude that EUR 5 is not considered to be alot of money to internet users in 2006.
• Currency was unattractive: The de facto currency of the internet is USD, not EUR. I think many visitors from outside the eurozone, especially those actually in the US, thought the bureau de change commission would deflate their prize beyond its already meagre amount, or perhaps they don’t know about bureaux de change.
• It seemed “too good to be true” to some visitors: I received an email from one visitor asking if this was a joke, he/she didn’t believe I would actually send the money to the winners. Well, no it wasn’t a joke, I did actually post the envelopes, and yes they did contain EUR 5. It is hoped that the receipients will post an image them on their respective blogs.
• Some people wouldn’t know a good deal if it was spelled out to them: I thought the post slug was a clincher, but it seems many bloggers are slow, I got one email that simply had the word “weird” in the subject and this URL in the title, so someone took the time to say that (and that is fine), but they never actually entered.
• The Pingback: This is perhaps the most interesting observation. Many bloggers have this feature disabled, for example thedayshift, geistban. I found these from the referer logs. These were not entered in the competition, but bloggers really should enable pingback as they are losing incoming links (albeit nofollow ones)
• Copycats: I use the term nicely, I hoped others would copy the idea! (of free money, not just free tickets or other goodies which is not as exciting). So far I found one Jason Roe looked for Hotel Accomodation in Cork (I recommend Jurys Inn Cork, Anderson’s Quay, Cork T 021 4943000 It is the nearest to the Bus Station and Train Station (indeed it has a line of sight to the former and the yard of the latter), as for the Aurport there is Bus Eireann service from there to the aforesaid Bus Station). Roe offered EUR 10 to the winner, and a EUR 5 to the runner up, so the outlay was the same.

Stock image of a EUR 5 note…

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