Give a prize for performing a certain action on your website. Make sure that that action educates the visitor about your brand.

Once you have a prize in mind, contact other websites that target your demographics and offer them a commission for every visitor they bring to your site. They can advertise the prize on their website.

I like this idea I wish more websites would do this. I guess some people fear that these contests can be hacked (some hacking submiting all the votes for himself or whatever).

You can restrict IP addresses from voting more than once over a given time, and really limit abuse.

Contests are always fun. I love them. I am cautious about where I do them though, so make sure your webpage looks the part.

I really like the concept of contests to promote a website...many times I have also found that even if the prose is not very huge, people still want to participate just to try their luck..so it isn't really important as to the value of the prose, as long as it is useful and relates to your website and thereby brings more viewer to the site.

THat's a good idea. Another thing you could do, if you want people to keep coming back, have a contest that continues for several weeks, so they have to come back for the next stage. On one sports forum i admin, i run a prediction contest for the weekly results, with a leader board and bonus point questions etc.

The winner of the contest gets a special signature award, and a bottle of Champagne. It's not a big prize, but the rivalry keeps them coming back every week to see how they did.