Photo Contest Sponsor Program

The Not Another Photo Contest was first introduced in October, 2010 with one thing in mind, create a photo contest that would be inclusive and not exclusive.  This unique contest has taken off like a rocket with first months entries (that passed the first stage qualifications)  in excess of 900 qualified images.  The images came from over 330 photographers, 90% from our Amateur  contestants and the remainder from our Professionals.

It is projected that as the contest progresses through November and final judging in December we will receive over 600 photographers entering the contest, with over 2,000 images.  IPA believes we have created a viable and successful contest that will attract thousands of visitors to our contest who will vote for their favorite photographers images.

Unique TV Style Voting – Social Networking Promotions

Our TV type voting is weighted as follows:   25% for popular votes received by our contest Thumbs Up votes and 75% from our three panel judges.  This type of voting encourages our photographers to campaign on Facebook, websites, forums and blogs by making them actively involved in getting their work seen and hopefully voted for. This active promotion means greater excitement and increased viewers and voters that will come to see our contest pages and gallery pages.  Our goal was not to simply bring traffic to the site, but rather greater exposure for our contestants and their wonderful photos.  IPA has always stressed the importance of giving our members and now our photographer contestants, exposure and credibility and this contest does that beautifully.

We have created a “Vote For Me” logo that is available as an image file or an html code that our photographers can simply copy and paste into their sites.  Those clicking on the logo link will then be taken to the contestants images in the proper gallery.  This is one of the reasons that  our site is seeing so much traffic and has so many inbound links to our site.

Click to Enlarge

Many of us know, that the more sites pointing to a website means higher relevance to Google and other search sites. Those sites with thousands of inbound links like IPA’s is considered more relevant and will then receive first page rankings on a search.  IPA, receives First Page Rankings with our 2,700+ inbound links to our site, which grows each day.

In the 25 active days of the contest we received over 31,000 visitors who we have identified as photographers or those interested in photography. Click on the chart to the left and see the actual and true numbers.

The average image size of images being entered into our contest is under 100 KB in size and we will deliver over 90 GB of image downloads (over 1.5 million jpgs) to visitors to our contest pages in the first month alone. We now estimate that by the end of November entries and then the first three weeks of December for final judging and voting on the 30 finalists, we will receive another 50-60,000 unique visitors which will bring our total of uniques to 100,000 photographers from the United States and many of the countries we have opened to this contest.

We expect to deliver over 250 GB of images to those visitors and the number of image views will be in the  millions.

With the support of our sponsors with new ones that are now coming on board for future contests, we expect the contest and its place in our industry to only grow.  If you are not familiar with our unique contest methods please visit our Press Release that details the reason our Not Another Photo Contest, has lived up to its name.

We have designed a sponsorship program that will not only enable us to offer valuable prizes to the winners, but will help to support the necessary costs in running the contest, producing promotional materials, our advertising costs for listings on various contest and other websites which we believe is important to the success in this contest.

We of course also need to cover the costs for our staff to receive all the entries, send our emails to congratulate those contestants who are accepted into our contest, rejections to those that haven’t qualified and in some cases a resubmit email for those we feel have merit, but didn’t follow our rules in their submissions.

Levels Of Sponsorship and Costs

There are a number of sponsorship opportunities for both larger companies as well as smaller ones. Again, we want our contest to be an inclusive one, so that will include sponsors too. Of course we will only accept sponsors that we feel will meet the high standards IPA has always maintained in our membership program and in our dealings with all the companies we have reviewed over the years and those we have agreed to publish their press releases.

If after reviewing our program you would like to see if you qualify for our sponsor program please contact us for further information.  Here is a brief overview of sponsor levels and costs.

Primary Sponsors

Should be an international or national branded line of Photographic, Software or Travel Industry product or service. We will consider others as well on a case by case basis.

We will accept a minimum of $4,000 worth of product at street retail that will be used for prizes and to help offset contest costs.  Our primary sponsors will not only receive a mention in our Press Releases that are distributed to hundreds of members of the photo and main stream media.  They will be featured on our Contest Prizes pages.  Our primary sponsors will also be featured in our Blast and follow-up emails that are sent out to over 20,000 photographers and members of our groups on the main social networking websites.

Finally, our primary sponsors will have an opportunity to share in some of the costs of any extraordinary promotional opportunities that may evolve during the contest run should they wish to be included in those opportunities.  These might include the Super Cards we have distributed at the PDN PhotoPlus Show and other opportunities we may find of interest.  They may opt in or opt out from these “extra opportunities”.

Co-Sponsers

Our Co-sponsors might include smaller companies that want to create traffic to their websites, become a branded line, want heavy exposure for  their products on our contest pages and need the credibility by being part of a promotional opportunity with some of the larger branded companies in our industry.

We believe that the participation in our contest can achieve what many companies never will on their own.  Running their own contests simply doesn’t work for many and only ends up costing more time and money then they may be worth.  The exposure and credibility that IPA can deliver and at a cost that is far less then self promotions (or the costs of  Google Ad Words) makes our program good business during these difficult economic conditions.

Co-Sponsorships will  be available at a monthly cost of $250 to $750 per month for each of the three months the contest run.  The cost will depend on the pages a sponsors ad appears and other factors including, the size of the ad.  The larger co-sponsor levels will receive an ad or ads on select pages in our contest group. As an additional promotional benefit to our smaller co-sponsors, we will also include those sponsors that wish to contribute some of their products to our contest a spot on our Contest Prizes pages at no additional cost and those will link to the sponsors website or landing page.

We have space available on our pages for traditional banner ads or a more popular journalistic style ad, similar to the ones you see on our current contest pages. Prime space is available on the Main Landing page, our heaviest hit page, on the Inner contest pages to include, our heavily hit Rules page and of course each of the Main Gallery pages.

In addition to these opportunities, we will also offer advertising on our Newsletter which is distributed to over 20,000 IPA members both staff and affiliate members, plus thousands of registered visitors. Our Newsletter remains on our website for two months and then is replaced by the next issue.

IPA has a number of other opportunities but for the sake of this offering, we feel there is enough to digest and will be happy to discuss others with you.  We do expect each sponsor to promote the contest on their websites and in their emails and newsletters which will increase the traffic to the contest, thus helping every participant in making it a huge success. We will provide necessary art, copy and HTML code if necessary to help our sponsors post an approved and effective display on their sites.

For Further Information Please Contact:

Len Rapoport
President

International Press Association
Email: lenrap@internationalpress.com

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