Back when I was one of the people in charge of the Middle Earth d20 site at EN World, we ran a NPC contest also, to drum up traffic to the site. We got a number of cool entries, but it seemed that traffic to the site dropped off the table immediately afterwards. This was going right around the time the movies were still being released. Decipher released it's Lord of the Rings RPG, and that pretty much hammered the last nail in the coffin for that site - traffic slowed to pretty much nothing. Every few months somebody would email me about this or that about he site, but that only happened 3-4 times.
So I can sympathize.