Running a contest could be a good idea to drive more visitors to your WordPress blog. The viral effect resulted by a successful contest would be a massive advantage for your blog growth.

Social media is one of the best channels to drive website visitor these days, apart from SEO. Nearly all bloggers and start up owners have been adopting a social media campaign to encourage their users/readers to actively involved in the growth of a project they are doing.

Hard work is still required for a successful contest with social media. Plus, you should also work smartly in order to make your contest go on your way.

Don’t worry if you have no programming skill to develop a contest plugin/program, or haven’t knew about what kind of contest you are going to run. Here are some WordPress plugins to inspire you creating a contest that is best suited for your blog.

1. Photo Contest WordPress Plugin

If your focus is developing a photography blog, then you will need this plugin to run a contest that involving photographs from both, you and your visitors. For instance, you ask your visitors to upload their best photos to your blog and will be rewarded with points. Points come from other visitors. The more a photo be shared to social media, the more points they will get. This will be a gateway of the virality of your blog.

Photo Contest WordPress Plugin is a paid plugin priced at $29 for a regular licence. You can have its demo to check if this plugin match your need or not.

2. Video Contest WordPress Plugin

Developed by the same developer as Photo Contest WordPress Plugin, the features of Video Contest WordPress Plugin is a bit similar to it. But, this plugin has been designed specifically for video contest. Don’t worry about your hosting storage space as this plugin use a third party video providers such as YouTube and Video.

The Video Contest WordPress Plugin is also priced at $29 for a regular license. This plugin is easy to use and comes with a powerful admin panel.

3. Contests by Rewards Fuel

Contests by Rewards Fuel is also a great plugin to set a goal on blog virality. You can set a contest where your visitors should do a variety of tasks on social media such as following your Twitter or Instagram account or share to their social media accounts. As a reward, you give them points. Visitors with the highest points deserve an exclusive gift.

You can use this plugin for free but register is required. However, free account comes with very limited features. If you need something more you can also register for the paid one which is started from $7.95/month for the Starter Plan package.

4. Pick Giveaway Winner

Creating a giveaway post is also a common way that is be adopted by bloggers for generating more traffics to their blogs. Visitors need to get involved to a blog post, such as commenting, in order to win something that is be offered by bloggers. In other hand, bloggers have to wisely choose who is deserve the gift. Pick Giveaway Winner helps bloggers to randomly choose the winner. This is a very basic plugin and is available for free.

5. ContestFriend

The main purpose of this plugin is to help you in collecting more email subscribers. Your readers/contestants will increase their chance of winning by sharing the contest you are running to their friends via social media. It’s like the concept of word-of-mouth marketing. You’ve got options to set contest duration at the outset, and controls for keeping tabs on how your contest is performing in terms of numbers of participants throughout.

ContestFriend is also available for free. Since it’s designed specifically to help you generate more emails, you can utilize this plugin as a starting point for the next bigger contest.

6. ShowDown

You ask your readers to choose between two images (or products). The result will be displayed immediately after you selecting your options. You can add several pair of images before going further to offer something to your readers. It’s a fun and interactive way to let your readers get interact with your blog. You need to pay $23 for the ShowDown plugin.

7. Opinion Stage

If you want to discover the opinions from your readers over something, you can try this plugin. Furthermore, this plugin also allows you to run other interactive contests by providing quizzes, polls, surveys and forms. All are great for engaging your audiences. Opinion Stage is available for free so you better maximize this plugin before it’s (probably ) turn to paid service.

8. InviteBox

InviteBox is a good option if you want to run a goal-based contest. Your readers will only be rewarded once they reached their goal in referring their friends to, for instance, register to your site. They can always check the contest page to monitor their progress and see how far their winning chance. InviteBox is free plugin. Premium version is also available if you get something good of this plugin and want get the more out of it.

9. SoundCloud Sound Competition

Clear enough. SoundCloud Sound Competition enables you to host an audio-based contest. The plugin is integrated to SoundCloud, which mean, all the medias you use for the contest are the ones that are uploaded to SoundCloud. You can ask your readers to vote between two or more audios. This plugin also supports Facebook vote but you need to upgrade to the premium package.

Setting up audio contest with SoundCloud Sound Competition is easy enough but it take a little while because you are required to create a SoundCloud app first.

10. WP Contest Creator

WP Contest Creator tend to be suitable for a larger site. This premium plugin offers a variety of contests that you can choose based on your specific need to grow your site. Apart from customizable content creator, the plugin also comes with analytics tool to help you track and manage your competitions, as well as collect leads.

You need to think twice before buying this plugin as it is not cheap. Before be able to use this plugin you have to pay $99 for a single domain!

11. Football Pool

If you have a specific site about football, then you seems like have to try this one. This is a free plugin that adds a fantasy sports pool to your website. It allows your viewers to play against each other, predict outcomes of matches and earn points. This should be cool for a football site.

12. Kingsumo Giveaways

Last but not least. Kingsumo Giveaways is another great tool to let your audiences winning a prize. Before it’s happen, they need to give their emails and do some additional steps you’ve set. Kingsumo Giveaways is a bit similar to ContestFriend that helps you collecting more emails. But, you need to pay $198 before using this plugin. Expensive enough but you have to pay once for a lifetime.

UPDATE

13. WP Foto Vote – photo and video contest

Within a few clicks, you can host one of a kind contest that spreads like wildfire on social media.

Features like the powerful form builder for collect entrants data, pagination, email notifications, private results, re-captcha integration, anti-cheating layers, widgets and 10 preset skins are within. The plugin is kept active maintained, and it is compatible with latest version of WordPress script along with all known modern web browsers plus responsive design for mobile devices.

WP Foto Vote was developed with performance in mind – you can host unlimited contests at the same time with unlimited entries count.

Plus, on top of all that, the developers even provides helpful support too.