Furniture Retailer Builds Awareness With Inbound Link Contest

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If you can't afford to advertise, then bribing...uh...influencing others to do so is one alternative and its the one Wholesale Furniture Brokers recently took. The furniture retailer promises to give away $3,000 worth of furniture to the site, blog or forum that sends the site the most traffic. Wholesale Furniture Brokers will track inbound traffic to its site and the site that delivers the most visitors to its site between June 1 and August 31 will win the prize. So if you need furniture or you just wnat to see what these guys are all about, by all means, click here.

by Steve Hall    Jun-21-06   Click to Comment   
Topic: Good, Online, Promotions   

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Comments



Comments

too cynical...

Posted by: daniel on June 21, 2006 10:20 AM

"Too cynical...."that's a good description!! I would be more impressed if I heard they were going to spend a year in a study of how the Nebraska Furniture Mart in Omaha, KC and soon to be upper midwest does it.

Posted by: Roy on June 21, 2006 10:36 AM

You know who will win? Probably a site that's already sending it a bunch of traffic. I suppose that a link builder could come in and build a thousand links from various sites, but I wonder if that would qualify.

Posted by: Shig on June 21, 2006 10:51 AM

Bribing is a good way to describe it - we actually considered promoting it as a bribe. Do you think that would work? Maybe this posting will give us some kind of idea.

Do cynical people not like bribes?

Sure it's a marketing tactic, but it's honest. We're hoping for other benefits as well:
1. Publicizing the winner.
2. Finding new quality sites to advertise on. In other words, even if a site doesn't win, but it sends us quality traffic, we'll pursue an advertising contract with them. You could look at it as a bribe for a test drive.
3. Measuring which sites are the most effective for launching future bribes.
4. Furnishing some genius marketers home or office. (That's really our specialty, this marketing stuff is a lot of fun too though.)
5. New friends. Bribing is a good way to make & keep friends right? It works for the tobacco industry . . . and wasn't it furniture manufacturers who bribed the government to impose anti-dumping tarrifs on Chinese imports? Are we bribing the wrong people?

To clarify on some of the comments above:
- sites that were already linking to us do qualify, unless we're paying to be listed on their site.
- the current leader is http://www.FedexFurniture.com, they did not link to us prior to this contest.
- building hundreds of links would essentially enter each of those sites seperately, so more chances to win I guess!

Since the 'Bribing' link above doesn't work, I'll provide the link to the contest page again http://www.GoWFB.com/contest.php

Honestly, we thought $3000 in furniture would be a big enough bribe to get some creative marketers to come up with some interesting ads in some interesting places. Anyone up to the challenge?

Dave from Wholesale Furniture Brokers

Posted by: Dave from Wholesale Furniture Brokers on June 22, 2006 9:08 PM

Dave the old time circus barkers would be standing with a grin on their face. Now you will have t give us a report on how it works in th end.

Posted by: Roy on June 24, 2006 10:04 AM

Dave the old time circus barkers would be standing with a grin on their face. Now you will have to give us a report on how it works in the end.

Posted by: Roy on June 24, 2006 10:06 AM

Roy, indeed we will report back on how well (or how poor) this bribe worked. I wouldn't be surprised if Furniture.com is having a board meeting right now, taking a vote on whether or not they should scrape $3500 together for a "We'll Out-bribe Wholesale Furniture Brokers Contest".

Posted by: Dave from Wholesale Furniture Brokers on June 26, 2006 7:40 PM

Sorry, that comma on the end of the http://www.FedExFurniture.com link is messing it up.

Posted by: Dave on June 26, 2006 7:54 PM

Apparently the Useless Men at Useless Advice from Useless Men think the contest is so useless, they're donating the prize, should they win it, to one of their lucky readers.

http://uselessmen.blogspot.com/2006/06/question-318-useless-contest.html

They seem opposed to advertising, but not useless bribing from shameless online furniture stores.

Posted by: Dave from Wholesale Furniture Brokers on July 6, 2006 6:21 PM

Well, we have our winner and it's been announced on the contest page here: http://www.GoWFB.com/contest.php

Overall, the contest was a success with over 100 sites participating. We were honestly hoping for a lot more though. Any ideas on why more people didn't buy into it?

We're planning on launching a new contest with a new format. Any suggestions?

Posted by: Dave from Wholesale Furniture Brokers on September 6, 2006 1:45 PM