Branded contest website
A mobile-first site preloaded with categories, ready to brand. Run it standalone at your own custom domain, or embed it inline on your existing publication site so voters never leave your brand.
A platform for local publishers
Turn local pride into your most profitable annual franchise.
Best of Magazine gives publishers a complete Best Of contest platform — nominations, voting, winners, merchant directory, and a beautifully printed magazine — without building software, designing creative, or running a fraud-prevention war room every voting day.
Built for alt-weeklies, city magazines, regional newspapers, and chamber-affiliated media.
Everything in one program
The full Best Of contest system, already shaped for publishers.
A complete program covering software, design, print, marketing, fulfillment, and operations. Stand up your market’s contest in weeks, not quarters.
280-category starter library
Don’t start from a blank ballot. Launch with a researched, ready-to-customize category library spanning food and drink, shopping, services, lifestyle, and community.
Print-ready magazine template
A professionally designed Best Of magazine template, ready for your winners. Stitched or perfect-bound, ready for your printer, ready for advertiser placements.
Marketing creative for every phase
Digital creative for nominations, voting, and winners — social posts, email templates, web banners, ready to deploy. Your team customizes; we provide the canvas.
Optional contest awareness kits
Yard signs, banners, outdoor stickers, window clings, rack cards, floor graphics. Give nominees, finalists, and winners physical signal in their neighborhoods.
Publisher operations console
Manage campaigns, configure dates, approve nominations, review flagged votes, publish winners, handle ties, and export results. Built for editors and ad teams.
Merchant import, export, and directory
Bring your existing merchant database in via spreadsheet. Maintain a year-round directory of every business that’s ever been nominated, finalized, or won.
Personalized winner promotions
When the winners are announced, your sales team has an immediate sales motion: personalized promotional materials publishers can sell to winners through a clean order flow.
Contest lifecycle
One platform, four phases, every year.
The state of your contest changes automatically as the dates roll. Voters see the right experience at the right time, and your team focuses on editorial and sales rather than site mechanics.
Nominate
Voters submit local businesses by category. The system suggests existing businesses as voters type and lets new merchants be added inline. Voters are captured, returns are remembered, and your nomination data starts feeding the directory immediately.
Vote
Finalists appear in a clean mobile ballot. Voter cookies, IP rate limits, disposable-email blocklists, and invisible CAPTCHA quietly weed out low-quality submissions. Real voters never feel friction.
Publish
Publishers review computed winners, handle ties or overrides, then release category winners and runners-up at the moment they choose. Suspicious votes can be flagged, reviewed, and invalidated before publish.
Grow
Company profiles accumulate award history, winners receive embeddable badges for their own sites, and your sales team has fresh reasons to talk to every nominated business in the market.
Trust
The hard parts of running a Best Of contest, already solved.
Publishers who’ve run a contest know what goes wrong. We built around those lessons.
No empty-launch problem
A pre-loaded category library means your contest looks established from day one — not a half-finished blank slate that voters bounce off.
Built for voting-day traffic
Performance-tested architecture handles the traffic spike when your contest goes viral on social. No site collapses. No voting-suspended emergencies.
Defensible results
Anti-fraud signal logging, audit trails, and publisher review tools mean your winners stand up to scrutiny — even when a losing nominee complains.
Multi-year continuity
Year two doesn’t start over. Categories carry forward, company profiles accumulate award history, and your contest gets stronger every cycle instead of resetting.
Outcomes
A contest business that compounds each year.
Best Of campaigns aren’t engagement projects. They’re audience, brand, merchant, and revenue programs that improve every year you run them.
Increase campaign ROI
Bundle sponsorships, print ads, digital placements, winner promotions, and awareness kits around one high-interest annual franchise. New ad units that don’t compete with your banner inventory.
Raise publication awareness
Put your publication at the center of local recommendations, merchant pride, social sharing, and neighborhood conversation for two-plus months a year.
Build first-party audience data
Capture voter and merchant activity through your own branded campaign rather than handing the relationship to a third-party platform.
Open merchant conversations
Nominees, finalists, and winners give your sales team natural reasons to contact local businesses before, during, and after the campaign.
Create a lasting local directory
Company profiles and winner history become useful year-round content, not a one-week traffic spike. SEO traffic continues months after the campaign ends.
Reduce production load
Preloaded categories, designed templates, and repeatable marketing assets make each annual campaign easier to pull off than the last.
No engineering team required
Run the contest end to end without WordPress developers, designers, or sysadmins. The platform comes already engineered.
Defensible against algorithm shifts
Your contest lives on your domain, with your audience, in your data. Not at the mercy of platform changes that have hammered local publishers for a decade.
A reason to talk to every advertiser annually
Even merchants who said no to your last pitch will engage with a nomination. Sales conversations open themselves.
New sponsorship inventory
Title sponsors per category, presenting sponsor for the contest, sponsored print pages in the magazine. Inventory that doesn’t compete with display ads.
Year-round content engine
Winner pages and company profiles drive SEO traffic 12 months after the campaign ends. The contest works for you long after voting closes.
One playbook, repeated annually
Train your team once. Run the same contest framework every year, refining operations rather than reinventing them.
Built for
A platform for the publishers who shape local conversation.
Alt-weeklies
Already running a Best Of? Replace your aging custom site with a maintained platform.
City and lifestyle magazines
Add a year-round contest franchise to your editorial calendar.
Regional newspapers
Reach the merchants you couldn’t sell display ads to with a contest they actually want to be in.
Chamber-affiliated media
Your members nominate and vote in a platform you control.
At a glance
Built to scale across markets.
Investment
Transparent, market-sized pricing.
Pricing scales with your market size and selected services. Most publishers see ROI within a single campaign cycle through new sponsorship inventory, awareness kit revenue, and winner promotional sales — independent of the audience and merchant-relationship value.
Schedule a demo for a tailored quoteBring a professional Best Of platform to your market.
Start with one publisher site. Prove the workflow. Scale the same platform across every market you serve.