So far I’ve avoided posting too much about work on my blog, but this week work is really exciting, so I thought I would write about it.
After my trip to Paris to check out an apartment (you can read about that here), we have been making loads of adjustments to our website to get it ready to run a competition to win a three night stay in that apartment. The prize is for two people and includes transport there and back.
We’ve had the website up and running since January, but other than telling our friends and a bit of work on Twitter and Facebook, we haven’t promoted it at all. So this week we’re running our first promotion with Female First magazine. We want to gauge whether people like the idea of our business and want to win the prizes before we run any more.
The competition is run through a lowest unique bid auction and it costs just £1 to enter. We’re only holding the auction open for two weeks so the chances of winning are likely to be pretty good, I don’t imagine we’ll get that many entrants, particularly as we are only doing one paid promotion.
The reason you have to pay to place a bid in a lowest unique bid auction is because the winner is the person who places the lowest bid that nobody else has placed. That means that if four people bid £0.01, two people bid £0.02, but you are the only person to bid £0.03, you will win the auction. Whoever wins will only pay the amount that they have bid for the holiday, which is likely to be a nominal amount, often pence rather than pounds. So in order to make a business out of it and also give some money to charity, which is one of our aims, we have to charge people a little bit to bid on the auction.
The reason for using the lowest unique bid auction format is because we wanted it to be fun, but we also wanted people to have to put some thought into it. It can be fairly difficult to understand (I think it’s explained a little better here), but that’s the idea. We give you loads of information both on the website and even more information after you’ve placed a bid. This allows you to take quite an educated guess at what the lowest unique bid might be, so the winner doesn’t just win through chance, there is a bit of skill involved so if you win, you’ve really earned it!
So, hereis a link to our lowest unique bid auction to win a three night break in Paris.
If you’re interested in competitions, our promotion with Female First is free to enter and you can win a personalised hamper worth £100. You can find that here.
I am really dedicated to making a success of this business. The owner is a good friend of mine who has employed me to run the website from home, working my hours around looking after Libby. This is an amazing opportunity, and we hope that in the future we will be able to help other people to find ways of working flexibly so that they can manage to work full time and still be there for their children.
plutoniumsox 