Giveaways can be a great way of showing off one of your products as well as building up your following on social media or even on an email list. However, there are some important things to remember if you are thinking of running a giveaway.
Create or find something of value to giveaway
The value of the giveaway is key to whether you are going to attract visitors on to your site or not. Also, although this may sound simple, always give something away that relates to your blog. For example, if you run a blog for vegetarians, a year’s supply of meat just wouldn’t help at all. Although that is a fairly extreme example, some people do make the mistake of giving something away that bears no correlation to the content on their site. Try to choose something that your readers will love or maybe even something you have blogged about in the past. If you run a cooking blog and have reviewed a product to find it full of positive comments, give that product away as you know you have somewhat of an audience for it already.
If you are really struggling with what to choose, research some giveaways that other blogs in your field have done to see how successful their campaigns were.
Contact relevant blogs in your niche
The next step is to do some outreach and find bloggers who will be interested to promote your offer. Similar to the prize, you want to contact bloggers that are in your field so you can help each other. Don’t just jump straight in out of the blue as you are more than likely to get ignored; instead, start off with an introduction to let them know exactly who you are and what you do. You can also be active around their blogs by commenting and sharing.
After a little while, hopefully you would have spoken to this blogger multiple times and have some sort of friendly relationship. If this is the case, you can then ask for their help with a giveaway by providing a discount coupon or sharing the giveaway post with their readers. Remember to be friendly and don’t just ignore them once they have helped you, having relationships with other bloggers can be really useful in the long run.
Rules and dates of your giveaway
The rule of thumb to follow is to keep the giveaway as simple as possible. Visitors will be more likely to enter if it takes them a couple of seconds compared to if they have to spend their valuable time which could be being spent elsewhere. There are a number of different types of competition:
Writing – Here, you could ask visitors to come up with a review, slogan or even the name of a product and then give the prize to the winner.
Comment – The simplest of them all requires just one comment; it is then up to you if you ask for something in particular (a review, feedback or a simple slogan) or just let the visitors comment whatever they wish.
Subscriber – This is the option that could potentially help you to grow the most as you will be asking people to sign up to enter; either to an RSS feed, social media or your newsletter (if you have one). This can be great when you look to launch new blog posts and products in the future as you will have an audience for your email. Not everyone will return but a good percentage should!
When it comes to the dates, this can be a particularly tricky decision. For example, if you run the giveaway for too long, people may start to get frustrated and you could actually lose followers. However, if you go for a shorter giveaway, you may not be able to reach as wide of an audience.
The best thing to do is to plan ahead to find the right balance; decide exactly when the giveaway will run from and to, decided how many posts you will put up etc. This way, you won’t be making on the spot decisions and people cannot question the rules because you have them clearly laid out. If you are really struggling, research other giveaways once more to see how long they ran for!
