Say it" with Original On-line Greeting Cards and their August Summertime Sweepstakes
By Jacquie Kubin

Win dollars while earning pennies with SayIt (www.sayit.com). Launched in February of this year, SayIt provides a place to create and market original on-line greeting cards featuring photography, art and/or prose while taking part in contests and sweepstakes.

The site sponsors two monthly contests, giving away as much as $30,000 per month. For the August creator's "10 Most Wanted Contest" SayIt will be identifying the ten most popular creations on the site. The contest nets a $5,000 grand prize, $2,000 second prize, three $1,000 third prizes and five fourth place places of $500 each for the top nine images on the site.

Monthly contests are not only for the individuals submitting their original creations, but also for individuals who send SayIt creations. The SayIt August Summertime Sweepstakes will cap off the dog days of summer for the registered lucky winner who wins a grand cash prize of $3,000, just for sending any SayIt greeting card to a friend. "The contests are very important as they help to increase traffic to the site and help us to identify the most popular images and creators," said Raj Yogi, vice president of strategic marketing. "The creator contest help to encourage the individual submitting images to become prolific promoters, brining more visitors to SayIt. The Sweepstakes contests help keep users coming back to send more SayIt cards." Formed in August of 1999, SayIt "hires" the millions of Web surfers out there to create content for the SayIt Creative Marketplace. SayIt's business model is unique in that it relies on visitors to its site -- both those creating original materials and those that are sending greetings to friends and family -- for promotion. Original card and media creators will earn one point, or one cent, every time their artwork is sent out by a SayIt user, which can add up. One creator has already earned over $250 for her simple card design featuring a warm cuddly chocolate brown teddy bear with the message "Your deserve a treat...Everyday!"

"The original idea was to create a pure greeting card space, however we realized the unique opportunity in promoting user generated content," said Raj. "We found no other sites offering this type of "peer to peer" business model, and not unlike sites such as Napster (www.napster.com), the model turns our users and creators into content providers and promoters of the site."

For the site, which did not launch until February 2000 the idea seems to be working. They have been ranked among the top 300 Web sites on the internet (PC Data) and enjoy more than two million unique visitors per month "The site's success is viral in nature as the registered user submits and promotes their creations by sending them to others," said Raj. "That encourages new users to visit the site to retrieve their cards while the contests help to encourage them to become SayIt creators and senders."

SayIt hopes to reap financial reward by establishing relationships with e-commerce printers, such as IPrint.com (www.iprint.com) that will allow shoppers to have SayIt creations printed on real world items such as mugs, t-shirts and mouse pads.

A second revenue stream for the Web site comes from acting as the facilitators between the sites most talented creators and greeting card and gift manufacturers and even cartoon syndicators. "We have a wide range of talent on the site," said Raj. "We believe that approximately five percent of that content is extremely high end, and marketable in the real world. We can go to a greeting card company and say "we have this creator and character that is extremely popular on-line, that would also be popular on your cards."

The financial agreement between creator, SayIt and the manufacturer would be a royalty based with the creator retaining the rights to his or her characters.

At this writing the site has more than one hundred and twenty thousand creations with combined SayIt creators earning more than twenty-five thousand dollars. Computer artists can choose one of three ways to create artwork for the sites Creative Marketplace. SayIt Upload allows users to upload original photographs, art, cartoons, animators or other greetings created using any graphics program to the site.

SayIt Quick provides easy clip art and backgrounds that allow users to create unique images and SayIt Stickies provide an easy way to add props, border, backgrounds, word balloons, even facial disguises to original photos. The tools are designed to provide drag and drop functionality so that any visitor can quickly begin creating. "On-line greeting cards are wonderful, personal ways to send messages and announcements," said Raj. "SayIt takes this already popular activity one step farther and puts the creativity into the hands of the people, allowing them to showcase their talent and make their electronic message personal." SayIt monthly contests and sweepstakes will be continuing in nature so check out the site daily, send a greeting to a friend, and automatically be entered to win.

SAYIT SUMMERTIME SWEEPSTAKES OFFICIAL RULES This promotion is intended for residents of the United States (except Puerto Rico) and Canada (except Quebec) only and shall only be construed and evaluated according to the laws of the United States and Canada. Do not enter this sweepstakes if you are not located in the United States or Canada.

NEXT