Maybe you can talk about $500 worth of merchandise from a company that provides games, movies, books, etc, etc. Who cares if it is Amazon, just say it is thousands of products and that they ship, hopefully, worldwide?
However, I'm not so sure that the books issue is your only problem. I recall at one point offering a fairly large prize, but nobody cared. I ended up giving it away with very little to show for it.
I am guessing that people don't really believe in promotional gimmicks. They feel that it will be difficult to win, that they will work for nothing, and they may not even trust the prize to be truly awarded if your site isn't incredibly professional or a known name already.
The best you can do, like I did, is consider this a learning experience and try to find ways to make sure you get good value for promotional efforts. Maybe it would work better if you gave a daily $10 prize for fifty days. Better yet, maybe a weekly prize, based on weekly results, for fifty weeks.
If you can stretch out the contest and keep people motivated, perhaps saying that a weekly winner is entered in the grand prize, but can't win another weekly prize, so that people feel they have some type of chance, then they might be interested.
Anyway, I'm honestly not an expert at this, I just know I got burned a bit from it once. I am thinking of finding a way to offer people something for adding themselves to my directory, but it can't be very expensive... and it has to be easy to manage, and it has to be worth it in terms of return.
Hmm, I'm getting some ideas now...
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