// Internet Duct Tape

Now this I think is an interesting idea. You see companies do this all the time with contests, so why not individual bloggers? A blogger in Italy is giving away a 60 GB Video iPod to a person at random who links to his blog between now and August 4th.
It should be interesting to see how long it until this really takes off. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a lot of incoming links. I’m sure that it will, as a free iPod seems to be the price point for most people to sell their own mother. In the long term this will probably be a much cheaper method of generating word of mouth advertising than a real ad campaign. It really seems that generating organic word of mouth campaigns is taking off as a way of dealing with the “new media”.
What’s interesting about Lotek’s contest is the lack of boilerplate to protect the contest:

• You could provide a link, but make it rel=”nofollow” so that it doesn’t increase the search engine ranking. This would be a way of entering the contest without contributing to increasing his PageRank.
• No definition of what can be linked from. Bookmarking in del.icio.us is considered a valid entry. Posting a link in a forum could be considered a valid entry.

I’ve heard of link exchange bribery before (that is the fundamental principle of webrings), but I think this is the first time I’ve heard of a non-corporate blogger creating a contest to promote their site. Leave a comment if you know of any other examples.

>> Lotek » Blog Archive » Contest - I give away as a gift my black iPod Video 60GB for a link

Semi-Related Links:

• Understanding Tagging Folksonomy - How it Relates to Improving PageRank
• Building an Audience or “How I Learned to Stop Posting Inane Crap and Love the Blog”
• How Google Ranks Websites // Lorelle on WordPress