Behind the scenes for all your juicy insider information

The October contest kicked off early Thursday, and the battle for top spot is picking up.  You’ll notice some nifty banners around the site to tell you about the contest, and a slick new leader board with a real time snapshot of the top 10 contestants.  Once you break into the top ten you can keep track of your point total here in your quest for #1. Don’t forget – your choice of $100 or a special edition iPod is on the line!  There’s still plenty of time to get in the action.

Now that the contest is getting heated you might be wondering how you can help to boost your point total, and we’ve got some suggestions.  Your points are based on votes and ratings so there are a few things to keep in mind:

“Garbage in, garbage out”

Before you look outside, you should first examine your polls. Ugly polls generally mean low votes.  For best results you should try to make your poll interesting to others, visually attractive, and have a description that provokes a response from the voter.

Tweet my face-space?

Social networks are a huge resource for you. You can share your polls on facebook or myspace, or post them to twitter.  Doing this will allow hundreds of your friends to see what you’re up to and help you out!

You Digg it?

Digg is a cool way to promote new web content for other people to see.  Simply click the “Share on Digg” icon and we’ll help you post it onto their service.  Other digg users can then view your poll, and “digg” it if they think it’s cool.  A few other similar services are called Yahoo Buzz and Reddit – get your friends to help support your links on these sites and you could get tons of votes coming your way from all over the world!

Of course there are plenty of other ways to get more votes on your poll – post it on your blog/website, mention it to a few friends over IM, or do it the old fashioned way and tell them in person.  With the whole internet at your disposal, a little work goes a long way.  Those top 10 can easily change in just minutes, so have fun and keep at it! Good luck!

First thing is first: diPoll will be holding a contest!

Full details for the contest will be released soon here on the blog, so keep an eye out.  What I can tell you now is that the contest will be based on poll submissions – so start brainstorming ideas and saving pictures!  In the meantime we’re asking for your input to decide on the contest prize. Vote here to choose either a special edition iPod or a $100 gift certificate from Amazon, or comment on the diPoll with your own prize ideas.

It’s been a week now since we opened the site up for beta testing and we’ve already been getting some great feedback. It’s not falling on deaf ears! Here are the topics of a few of the comments and suggestions we’ve been getting:

Deleting images after uploading: A few people let us know about this one. They would upload their picture to create a poll, but if they didn’t like how it looked they couldn’t delete it. Now, you’ll find a big ‘X’ at the top of the picture that allows you to delete it and upload another one before you publish your poll.

Where’s the search box?: On the way! Soon you’ll be able to search our entire poll database to find the ones you’re interested in.

Username Rules: Oops! We forgot to mention restrictions on usernames when you’re registering, but that’s fixed now. Over the next few days you’ll also see some other big changes to our sign up page.

Randomizing / Dumb Next Button: Is our dumb next button giving you repeat polls? We’ve tinkered with it so that should be less likely now. In the future we’re going to be making it even smarter to give you more interesting and relevant polls.

Keep that feedback coming, and stay tuned for full contest details soon!