This amazing woman is the Contest Queen, a very active contest participant and promoter with over twenty years experience and wisdom to share. She’s also a prolific author and thinker and a very informative and entertaining blogger.  Add it all up and Carolyn is a profoundly original web marketer that would probably like to be considered North America’s Contest Queen, and indeed that’s exactly what she’s becoming…

You can read all about Carolyn Wilman, the Contest Queen on Canada Blog Friends which has just recently profiled her and published her vision of the future. The author has once again gone to great lengths to get all the subject URLS in order, and link to all platforms and properties in Carolyn’s royal realm.

Buy her book You Can’t Win If You Don’t Enter to read all her secrets.

Lenzr.com is almost sixty days old, and now has 73 members that have uploaded 114 original photos which have collectively amassed 6000 votes.  So far only one user has been banned from the website, and only four photos have been removed by Admin from the listings.

Here’s a glance at the Google Analytics dashboard for the entire first contest period. The spikes correspond to marketing initiatives by partners on various affiliated platforms. Participation is growing as Lenzr.com discovers new markets for contest data and streamlines the information distribution processes.

Hooray!  This is reason enough to cheer. I’ve seen other contests with twice the budget do half those numbers. And I want to give a shout out to those photographers who uploaded some really creative shots (like mighty shrimp’s picture of the 2008 Queen St Fire (below) and the lady who gave up the pictures of Cherry beach and Toronto Harbourfront. The high level of creativity is another big reason to cheer…Yay!

Summer in Toronto is the most successful contest with 56 pictures submissions and 3594 votes.  Highlights here include pictures of a man and dog eating ice cream, a Toronto Blue Jays fan, and a little boy in a splash pond.

Best Toronto Skyline has 44 photos submissions, including some amazing shots with lightning and ducks and vintage shots of the skyline, that have together gathered a total of  2390 votes.

Emergency in Toronto had 14 photos and 269 total votes – this was the hardest challenge and yet our favourite of the bunch. Photos like the one below (credit to mighty shrimp) are perfect as make Lenzr.com a worthwhile social political and historically culturally relevant destination.  In otherwords these shots make Lenzr cool.

Stay tuned for information on contest winners. These three contests end August 31st 2009. The Winners are the members who uploaded the most popular photos in each contest, as determined by the number of green thumbs up votes. And I should mention that the red ‘thumbs down’ vote does nothing, just so you know. Yes that’s what we’re changing…

UPCOMING CHANGES:
It’s no secret the voting mechanism is flawed – its too simple and inspires user manipulation. There’ll will be a multitude of minor changes coming in Contest Period #2 (the next round of contests will commence September 1st and conclude on October 31st 2009) The very first thing to be changed is the voting mechanism, alterations are also being made to the user registration process.

REGISTRATION:
Upcoming changes will force all current users to re register their usernames and profile information and check boxes to accept or deny coupons from sponsors, and other options.

LENZR WIDGET ADOPTERS
Have a look at DebLewis.ca and check out the 100x vertical sidebar widget on the lower half of the template.

Lenzr was built to help photographers gain attention in online media and get professional work by providing an easy,  fun to use platform that showcases great pictures.

Registered members have the option of listing their web URL in their profile and it really makes us happy when we see users taking advantage of this feature.  A link is a link, and successful artists and photographers have hundreds of them.  This little piece of social capital belongs to the photographers that use the site and that’s another curious biproduct of this cute little photo contest construct.

As we evolve Lenzr’s brand of premium online entertainment, we’ll no doubt make some friends along the way.

This is the best photo competition index website that we’ve ever seen;  our experts are indeed surprised at how much information these developers and administrators (and data entry interns) have thus far squeezed into this portal.  Seriously there must be over five hundred contests on there now, and almost all of them are free.

Photo Contest Rituals

This website boasts that a new photo contest is added everyday, and that’s exactly what serial web contest participants need to hear to plan and execute their daily entries, or atleast make bi-weekly visits.  That’s another winning strategy at work here.

Coincidently, we find it interesting to note that almost none of the contests listed on the afformentioned web index  are judged by the website’s own membership;  so we recognize now that this is something that makes Lenzr unique, (even if it is fraught with click fraud and abuse by iPhone users and their duplicitous friends* ).

RELAX devotees. *There are some serious changes coming down the pipe for the next round of contests on Lenzr, and that includes the scoring system. We’re confident, you’re going to like it.