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Here’s a great contest idea to keep in your back pocket for next Halloween. Star-Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) gives readers a few basic items (this week: flannel shirt & jeans) and asks them to dream up their most creative costume idea with those pieces for a chance to win a cash card. Simple, clever and fun (plus a sponsorship from Goodwill) – all the ingredients to an awesome contest.

We recently hosted one of our partner’s favorite webinars (okay, it’s one of our favorites, too) – 30 Contest Ideas in 30 Minutes. During this webinar, Julie Foley, our Director of Affiliate Success & Matt Coen, our President, reveals the top 30 contest categories run on UPICKEM in the past year. Each category comes complete with several examples for you to get your contest-building creative juices flowing to help build out your year-long contest calendar.

If you weren’t able to attend the live session, watch a recording in our resource center.

Be sure to check out all the contests mentioned in our webinar.

Keeping your deals programs fun and relevant will keep your subscribers engaged. An easy way to do this? Change the look and feel of your site to match the current time of year or holiday season. Take a look at this “Half Off Halloween” from program from WSBT-AM – it looks great! They are running deals for haunted houses, pumpkin patches and the like. Another great touch? Memorial Children’s Hospital is running an ad on the site with a link to trick or treating safety tips – how clever!

More Theme Ideas:
- A Father’s Day store:
- A Mother’s Day store
- A summer store
- A winter store

Have you run a themed deals program? Share your ideas in the comments.

What would the October contest of the month be without amazingly cute Halloween contest from Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)?! The Minneapolis Star Tribune always does an outstanding job with UPICKEM and this contest is no exception. For their Children’s Halloween Costume Contest, they partnered with Trail of Terror – a frightful Halloween event with over 15 attractions including a haunted corn maze and “monster” truck rides! The best costume scares up $1,000 and four runners up take home $100. This is a ghoulishy good contest!

What a fright! FOX 4 (Kansas City, MO) hosts this Halloween pet costume costume for their viewers. With a perfectly-themed (and a little bit scary) logo, and great prizes ($300 to Price Chopper or $200 gift card to McCarthy Automotive Group), this photo contest is a sweet holiday treat!

We may be a teeny tiny bit biased, but this Halloween photo contest from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO) is quite adorable. Why are we biased, you ask? Because the founder of Makaboo, the sponsor of this contest, is former Second Street employee Cindy Teasdale McGowan! I especially love the customization of the welcome page, especially the little Makaboo monkeys – fantastic job!