Free iPod Nano

The subtitle of this post should be, “December was a write-off” or something to that effect. I heard about a contest that was being put on by NameCheap though twitter. NameCheap is a domain registrar, and coincidentally I had just transferred haggaret.com to them back in October. The contest involved answering questions and getting the chance to win domain credits. The questions were asked every hour, on the hour, from Dec 1st through Dec 25th. Since it was December, the questions were all Christmas related. Unfortunately I didn’t hear about the contest until the 2nd day it was on (I think) so I was a bit late to the party, however, that didn’t stop me from making out like a bandit in the end. :)

As I mentioned, a question was asked every hour, on the hour for 25 days straight. For each question, there were three winners of a domain credit ($9.69). It started out with the three winners being the first three people to answer the question correctly, but was quickly changed to being the first person to answer correctly, and then two random draws of the people who answered correctly within the first 3 minutes, and the first 10 minutes. Also, you could only win once a day. In addition to the domain credits, they were also giving out an iPod Nano to the top three people who had the most questions answered correctly at the end of the contest.

I started out playing, just for fun, hoping to get a few free domain credits. Before long, I won a credit! That was cool, so I kept playing to see how many more I could get. I also started spreading the word to Steve, Dave, and JK cause I knew they appreciate free stuff. :) That worked out really well for me actually because Steve and I started ‘racing’ when each question was asked to try to beat each other with the correct answer. That resulted in us getting a few wins because not only did we beat each other, we ended up being the first to answer the question.

By about the 3rd or 4th day, NameCheap introduced a ‘leaderboard’ to show who was in the running for the iPods. To my surprise, I was in the top 10, somewhere around 6th I think when the leaderboard was introduced. I figured it wouldn’t last, especially since I was still, at that point, not answering questions at night, but opting to sleep instead. In fact I think I quickly dropped from 6th to 9th or 10th after the first or second night. That quickly changed though, after getting some encouragement from Steve and Dave. I started setting an alarm on my iPhone to wake me up every hour. I was answering the questions with my iPhone and if you can believe it, I even managed a first place win for one question. That leaderboard was a killer for me since if it hadn’t been published, I likely wouldn’t have gone for the big win, but once it was published, the competitor in wouldn’t let me drop out. :(

Getting up every hour wasn’t doing much for me, and Amy was getting annoyed at being woken up by the alarm, so I changed my strategy a bit. I decided that I could actually sleep for nearly two hours and still manage to answer all the qeustions. I’d get up at about 5 minutes to the hour, answer the previous hour’s question and then wait for the next question before going back to bed. While this strategy ended up getting me larger stretches of sleep, I was still quite exhausted every morning and Amy still wasn’t happy at being woken up. As a result, I moved down to the couch, or another bedroom, to sleep for the rest of the contest. :)

I’ll spare you any more of the details of just how difficult it was to answer each and every question that was asked every hour, on the hour, for 25 straight days. In the end, I actually managed to come in 1st for number of correct answers (as you can see by the photo with this post) – which won me an iPod Nano – and picked up 17 domain credits by the end of the contest. The guy who came 2nd actually managed to win 22 domain credits, but he was committed to getting first place wins right from the start of the contest, whereas I didn’t start trying for first place wins until quite a few days in. (As an aside, I think it is quite fitting that he and I won domain credits on the last two questions of the contest) I think Steve ended up with something like 19 domain credits, Dave got something like 13 and JK ended up with 6. All in all a very good haul for sure!

I’d like to thank NameCheap for running this contest – it seems like a pretty creative way to raise awareness of your brand. They gave away over $17K worth of domain credits (plus the 3 iPods) but hopefully they picked up a bunch of new recurring business. They wrote up a blog post about the contest and even mentioned me in it – check it out.