As a nominee for a Webby Award, you are also eligible to win a People's Voice Award.

Unlike other awards shows, The Webby Awards give the public an opportunity to decide who will take home a Webby. From now until April 29th, the public can cast votes in The Webby People's Voice Awards at http://webby.aol.com.

Start campaigning!

Voting runs from April 13th to April 29th. During that time, there are endless ways to get out the vote and boost your chances of winning. Campaigning is easier than ever this year thanks to a new integrated "Tweet This" functionality for votes, plus direct linking to your section of the ballot (more on that later), Beyond that, your imagination is the limit - past winners have launched sites, made videos and even harassed Jimmy Fallon (although we don't necessarily endorse that).

Here are some great ways that you can attract votes and promote your site:

MAKE USE OF WEBBY DIGITAL ASSETS

Keeping with this year's theme of the Battle for Web Supremacy, we're providing campaign tools designed by Shepard Fairey's creative agency Studio Number One. Get page takeovers, logos, banners, site bugs and personalized HTML emails to call your fans to action and put you in the thick of the Battle action. Don't forget to also post "vote for me" logos on any of your affiliate sites and pages (Facebook, Twitter, et al.)

Issue a press release

Use our easy-to-use press release template to garner local or national press.

TWEET, TWEET AND THEN RETWEET

This year, the voting public can automatically Tweet their votes right from the polling page. The Tweets may contain anything from your current rank to a thematically tough-battle message, but all Tweets contain a link to your portion of the ballot and will mention your Twitter handle.

Keeping up on the Twitter action helps you two-fold: you get an up-to-the-minute sense of the standings (also more generally by searching for trending topic #webbys), and you can ReTweet your fans' votes to acknowledge their shout-outs, generate more buzz and direct more people to the competition. The more you Tweet, the more widely spread your direct voting link becomes, and the closer you get to winning a People's Voice Award.

REBLOG OUR TUMBLR POSTS

At http://tumblr.webbyawards.com/ we're featuring daily digest snapshots of the People's Voice action, e.g. which races are tightest, who's in the lead, what categories are receiving the largest share of the votes, etc... By reblogging this info, you can keep your fans up to date and remind them of how high the People's Voice stakes can get!

Tap into friends in high places

2008 Webby nominee Anderson Cooper wasn't shy about asking his television viewers to vote for his site. Check out the clip here. Think of your friends in high places and how they might be able to support your campaign.

Create a video

Follow the lead of 2008 Webby nominees like Titan Greens TV and create a special video to encourage fans to vote. Last year, Fail Blog created an instructional video on how to vote, and Current made a personal video plea to potential voters.

Notify your fans

Blog posts encouraging fans to vote are common practice and highly successful. This post on Boing Boing and this post on CuteOverload serve as two examples. Encourage your network to vote by distributing an email blast to your database and sending notes to members of your groups and pages on Facebook and other social networking sites. Don't forget to use your direct category URL so your fans can vote for you right away.

Shine in your email signature

Have your team highlight Webby People's Voice voting information in their email signatures.