In this case study I’ll highlight one strategy you can use to promote your startup on a bootstrapped budget. When running a competition, you can leverage the networks of the competition’s participants. With the advent of ego-boosting social networks, your participants will love to spread the word, providing them with a platform to talk about themselves.

What you’ll need:
A self-hosted and properly configured WordPress blog

For this case study, let’s take a look at an essay competition. One of our clients is in the process of publishing a book. The client was interested in not only garnering some pre-publication attention but also involving their community in the authoring of the book itself. The winning author’s essay would be included as a chapter in the new book. The actual competition had already begun on the client’s main site, but we were about to add a new layer to the process.

The client had previously created a page on their website to announce the essay writing competition. Through some simple social media promotion and email newsletters, the competition had received approximately 2,200 essays from over 88 countries. Now that we had a list of participant email addresses, we sent out an email asking them to submit a 250 word excerpt from their essay to the book’s new WordPress website. Their new usernames and passwords would be emailed to them and they could login and publish their excerpt. They were informed that their excerpt’s page was going to contain social buttons e.g. Twitter, Facebook share, and Google buzz. Each participant was encouraged to promote their excerpt within their networks. The participant who brought in the most traffic to their excerpt by the deadline would be guaranteed an opportunity to work with the editors to shape his or her essay for inclusion in the book manuscript.

We used a WordPress plugin called Dagon Design Import Users, which allows one to register WordPress users en masse. We set all the new user accounts to ‘Contributor’ (we wanted to be able to approve the new posts before publication) and the new usernames and passwords were emailed to the participants automatically. We ran the WordPress based competition for about a month. In that time, we received over 185 excerpt submissions and approximately 10,800 visitors to the site. Facebook accounted for 56% of referral traffic. We also set up a Twitter account for the competition and used the WP to Twitter plugin so that every time an excerpt was published, it would be automatically tweeted.

This competition was very cost effective, easy to implement, and yielded a high return. The book received some great press and we now have a significant and targeted user base. Additionally, this connected platform will be a great resource to announce the book’s publication and initiate sales.

The competition’s basic structure can be copied for just about any product or cause. Keep in mind however that the competition’s award will be a key factor in how much interest and engagement you receive. I’ve seen other companies do this on a rolling basis with things such as iTunes gift certificates or laptop giveaways. Also, if your company is philanthropically focused, people love to be given the opportunity to talk about their involvement in your cause. Think of ways in which your startup can provide your audience with a platform and promotion will surely follow.