Hi @bycoleman,

I should've written this right after I resteemed your post but I had to head out to do business and run errands. As such, much of what I have to say has either been mentioned by someone else and/or already figured out by you. But I do believe I have new feedback for you as well.

Your move to make the post and contest was certainly a bold one, but also one that produced a double-edged sword on multiple fronts. I won't cover everything in my comment, just the stuff that stood out the most to me.

You had 128 followers when you started, and as of the time I'm writing up this comment you're up to 181. I ended up as one of your new followers because your post got resteemed into my feed, and I would think that many of the other new followers also arrived here by the same means. To me, that looks like a very successful effort to increase Steemian awareness of you, and you've still got 6+ days left on this current campaign.

On the flip side, there is the question of what quality of new followers are you gaining as a result of this. With Steemit being what it is, my hunch is that a significant portion of them are here for this contest, and only this contest. Once the contest ends, they'll leave and you'll never hear from them again. These "dead" or "ghost" followers don't exactly help out a business much, in my opinion. Hopefully I'm proven wrong and you do end up with a significant number of new followers who stick around to engage with you in the future, whether that be through comments or even just periodic upvotes to your future content.

Then there's the timing game, which has already been pretty thoroughly discussed. I'll readily admit it -- I tried to play the game. After I read through the post and understood how the contest would work, the next thing I did was open up Notepad and made a note to remind me to resteem your post on Feb. 10, with less than 20 seconds before payout. My original plans then changed because I checked real-time info on how many resteems you got, and a small window of opportunity presented itself for me to go after 25th place.

I'm sure you know now that if there is something to be pulled off within a contest, someone will discover it and try to do it -- or in this case, multiple people to correspond with the multiple opportunities. But hopefully, the goodwill that you've created, along with the publicity and awareness that you will gain from this contest, will lead to future returns that are far greater than the prizes you've budgeted. I will be rooting for your success.