Want to start a contest on your blog? Need some professional help? I think, you can give ContestMachine a try! ContestMachine is a new web service, that will make it easy for you to run a contest or promotional giveaway on your blog or website. They will provide you a cool contest widget that you can display on your blog and collect entries of your visitors. In my view, this is a cool idea. What you think?

Running a contest or giveaway with ContestMachine is very easy and involves only four steps. The first step is to create your contest or giveaway by setting the entry requirements and dead line. The second step is add your prizes and customizing your widget. Once your contest widget is ready, you need to embed it on your blog or website. That’s the third step, where ContestMachine will collect entries from your users. And tin he last step you will have to select the winners. That’s it!

ContestMachine contests allow you to choose winners based on entry content, and award prizes. Even you can manually disqualify those entries that do not meet your entry criteria. So, virtually you will be able to run and manage your own contest, without spending a lot of time. There is no limit on total number of entries entries and even they offers Email Opt-In service.

They offers three types of accounts – basic, monthly and annual account. The basic account costs you nothing. But the number of promotions per month is limited to 2 and there is no Email Opt-In service. On the other hand, monthly and annual account holders are charged $8.95/month and are allowed to run up to 10 promotions in a month. The annual account holders can run 50 contests per month and are charged $90/year. Both monthly and annual accounts includes Email Opt-In service and are allowed to export entries as a CSV file.

The basic free account is ok to start testing their system. But the drawback is that, you will not be able to export the list of entries as a CSV file and there is no way to let participants sign up for your email list. So, decide on the type of your account, as per your own requirements and enjoy running your blog contests in an interesting way!