My $1000 Marketing Idea

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

When it comes to business, I take more risks that anyone I know. The risks I take aren't just random but rather they're actually calculated. Basically, I weigh the risks vs rewards and then I decide to pull the trigger or not (not literally in case the govt officials are reading this). So although Kalimaat has been really good in sales, I wanted to try something new to promote it. I came up with an idea to market the game by having a video contest and to make the contest interesting, I decided to offer a $1000 prize for the winning video. And that all sounded great in my head but in reality, I was wondering where am I going to get $1000 from? haha

So I came up an idea to fund the contest by offering a discount on the game. By giving a $5 discount (coupon code "youtube" in case your interested), customers would be able to buy the game for $20 instead of its normal price of $25 from www.babaaligames.com. The goal was to sell 50 games at $20 each to make the $1000. So I made a video (link)to announcing the contest and posted it up on YouTube. By tracking the number of games bought with the promo code, I was able to account for the number of games bought as in result of the video contest promo. Alhamdulillah we have sold 50 games already.

As far as the marketing side, the contest allowed me to get 50 more games into circulation which means that possible hundreds of more people will be exposed to game when the play it with their friends inshAllah and that often leads to future sales.

The winner of the contest is not chosen by me but rather by viewers. In other words, the video with the most votes wins the $1000. So the second possible benefit from the contest was that people would make videos about Kalimaat and ideally would tell everyone they know to vote for their video, which in turn would get the game even more exposure. The ultimate goal would to have a bunch of Kalimaat videos on YouTube (biggest video site on the net) posted by users.

Next, I decided to have the voting done at www.babaaligames.com site which would bring more traffic to the site as well InshAllah. Thus, with the risk of $1000, I could have a bunch of videos made by customers about Kalimaat, an increase in game sales by offering a sale (discount code), while increasing traffic to the site where I sell the game.

Although we have sold the 50 games we needed to break even, only 1 video has been posted. So I'm not sure if people thought I was joking about giving away the money or if people are waiting till the last minute to submit their videos. Rest assured, if nobody else enters by March 31st at 11:59pm, the current video will win by default and he will receive a check for $1000.

Some of my friends may have thought I was crazy for giving away $1000 but I don't think they think I'm crazy anymore haha. Alhamdulillah now that I've basically broken even, everything from now on is just gravy. If anything, the contest gives people an excuse to pick up a camera and try to do something creative. I did a few years ago and look what happened...Baba Ali was born on the Internet.

Anyways, the contest is just a few days away so I'm interested in seeing what happens next :)