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How to Increase Your YouTube Views with a Giveaway

How to Increase YouTube Views with a Giveaway

Written By: author image Stacey Corrin
author image Stacey Corrin
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.
     Reviewed By: John Turner
reviewer image John Turner
John Turner is the co-founder of RafflePress. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Do you want to increase YouTube views with a giveaway? Running a giveaway is one of the best ways to get more eyes on your video content to improve your YouTube SEO. But knowing where to start is a challenge if you’ve never done one before.

This article will show you how to increase YouTube views with a giveaway quickly. Then you can grow your audience, boost your channel, and improve your business growth.

Step 1. Decide the Purpose of Your Giveaway

Before building any type of giveaway, you’ll need to figure out why to run one. Your goal is the driving force behind the kind of prize you choose, how you set up your contest, and how users enter.

Even though increasing YouTube views is your primary goal, you might have other reasons to run a giveaway, such as:

Note these goals down, as they’ll help guide you through the contest creation process. Plus, it’ll help you measure the success of your giveaway when it’s over.

Step 2. Choose a Relevant Prize

Once you’ve defined your giveaway goals, it’s time to choose a prize. Many brands pick a prize they think people will like without research.

The problem with this is that your target audience won’t be interested in your brand. So they won’t increase your viewership or convert into leads and sales. They’re just in it for the freebie.

Instead, choose a prize your audience desires that is relevant to your YouTube content and business.

Gaming merchandise giveaway prize

For example, gaming YouTube creators could offer a prize of gaming merchandise. Or, if your channel has a focus on health and fitness, you could offer a bundle of fitness goodies to potential viewers.

Other popular prize ideas include:

  • Gift vouchers to your store
  • Large cash prizes
  • Events and experiences
  • Your own products

For even more inspiration, check out these proven prize ideas.

Step 3. Increase YouTube Views with Giveaway Entry Requirements

After picking a relevant prize for your giveaway, you need to decide how users will enter for a chance to win. To increase your video views, involve your videos in the contest entry requirements. Doing so will increase your watch time, helping your videos rank better.

Here are some entry option ideas that’ll work to increase your view count.

Watch a Video to Enter

One of the easiest ways to get more users to watch your YouTube content is to ask them to watch a video to enter your giveaway.

RafflePress includes the Watch a Video entry option, which allows you to do this in return for entries.

watch a video entry option

After adding the action to your giveaway widget, enter your video URL to embed it. Then when anyone clicks the action to enter, they’ll see your video thumbnail and can watch it live in the widget. Visitors automatically get the entries once the video is over.

Giving users the option to view your video in the widget means they won’t have to click away from your website. So you’ll not only increase your YouTube views, but you’ll also increase the time spent on your site. This is an important ranking signal for search engines.

Visit Your Channel to Enter

Another way to increase your YouTube views is to get users to visit your channel for bonus entries.

RafflePress’s Visit a YouTube Channel action lets you make visiting mandatory. Users can then watch your videos, browse related videos, and subscribe, which is a great way to boost video subscriptions.

RafflePres visit a youtube channel giveaway entry option

Subscribing is optional, so you can follow YouTube’s Fake Engagement policy and rules.

Answer Questions About Your Video

If you’d like users to engage with your videos, you can get them to watch a video and answer a question about it on your giveaway widget.

You can do this with the Answer a Question option in RafflePress, which lets you include a question users should answer for entries. You can also verify that the answer is correct to make it easier to choose a winner.

answer a question action

Since users have to watch your videos closely to find the answer, it’ll increase viewing time, which can help you beat the YouTube algorithm.

Create a YouTube Scavenger Hunt

An alternative way for content creators to drive more views on YouTube is to hide clues in several videos across your channel. Users will have to hunt through your playlists, video descriptions, video titles, and end screens to find the clues and enter them on your contest widget for a chance to win.

A great way to do this is to add captions or notes to high-quality video content with clues. Each clue can point to a different video until users find the final video with a secret code. Once participants have the code, they’ll need to add it to your contest widget to enter.

You can use the Invent Your Own action to do this in RafflePress. Simply change the action label to “Enter the Secret Code.” Then write instructions on how to get started.

invent your own entry action with RafflePress

To confirm the entry, tell users to enter the code in the field provided.

As a result, you’ll increase views on many YouTube videos. And because it’s a fun event, it improves your relationship with your audience and audience retention.

Here are just a few more YouTube giveaway examples for inspiration.

Refer a Friend for Bonus Entries

Consider adding actions to your giveaway that reward users with bonus entries.

The Viral Refer-a-Friend action in RafflePress is an excellent way to do this. It lets you spread the word about your giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

viral refer a friend action

To secure more entries, users must share your contest on their preferred social media platforms. This exposes your giveaway to a broader audience, who’ll carry out more actions, refer more friends, and so on.

Step 4. Create Clear Giveaway Rules

The next step in your video marketing giveaway plan is to create a clear set of rules for your giveaway. This ensures your contest is fair and eliminates any confusion for your participants. It also keeps your contest on track and aligned with your goals.

Your giveaway rules should include the following details:

  • The minimum age for entering your contest
  • If your giveaway is limited to a specific geographic location
  • How people can enter your giveaway
  • What the grand prize is
  • How you’ll draw a winner
  • If anyone sponsors your contest

Once you’ve defined your rules, you’re ready to start building your giveaway.

Step 5. Use RafflePress to Create Your YouTube Giveaway

RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin on the market. It makes it easy to create a successful contest and gives you everything you need to increase your YouTube views, subscribers, and more, even if you’re a beginner.

RafflePress is easy to use, feature-rich, and offers design options to change your giveaway colors, fonts, and layout. It comes with a ready-made giveaway template designed to Grow Your YouTube Channel. So you can get up and running in a few clicks.

grow your youtube channel template

Check out this step-by-step guide on how to create an online contest to get started.

Step 6. Promote Your Giveaway On YouTube

Once your giveaway is live, you can’t simply wait for people to enter. A good contest marketing and digital marketing strategy involve promoting your giveaway to maximize participation. This should start with your YouTube audience since they’re already active and engaged with your brand.

Here are a few ways you can promote your new video giveaway on YouTube:

YouTube giveaway announcement video
  • Giveaway Announcement Video: Record a video announcing your contest and include details on how users can enter. You can follow up with more videos throughout your giveaway to keep up the momentum. Make sure you do search engine optimization and include target keywords in your video subtitles and description to show up in YouTube search and Google search results.
  • Video Call-to-Action Cards: Add a call-to-action card at the end of your announcement video that links to your giveaway landing page. Consider adding the same card to the most popular videos on your channel to increase entries. You should also craft custom thumbnails because they act as clickbait, spurring people to check out your great content.
  • Channel Partnerships: Consider teaming up with relevant YouTubers that create quality content and ask them to promote your contest on their channel. This improves contest participation and exposes your channel to a larger, relevant audience.
  • YouTube Ads: You can use YouTube ads and Google Ads to amplify the reach of your next online video contest. This approach can help your videos appear on the YouTube homepage and the video search page.

Step 7. Promote Your Giveaway Off YouTube

Chances are, you have a sizable following outside of your YouTube channel. So don’t forget about that audience when promoting your giveaway.

One of the easiest ways to promote your giveaway off YouTube is to share it on your other social media networks and ask people to tag friends in the comments.

You can also promote your contest by:

  • Creating an email newsletter
  • Submitting your giveaway to contest directory websites
  • Adding an exit popup to your website linking to your giveaway landing page
  • Creating a teaser video on Instagram using popular giveaway hashtags
  • Cross-promoting your video on other social media channels
  • Writing about your giveaway in a blog post and optimizing it with relevant keywords
  • Sending push notifications to users that opt-in to receiving updates

Begin promoting your giveaway as soon as it goes live to generate tons of entries and YouTube views.

Check out our article on more contest promotion ideas to help your giveaway go viral.

Step 8. Increase YouTube Views After Your Giveaway

Once your giveaway is over, there are still opportunities to use it to boost your YouTube views. You could even turn drawing a winner into a live YouTube event that’s sure to attract loads of attention.

For instance, you can live stream yourself using RafflePress’s random winner generator to pick your giveaway winner.

pick a giveaway winner

Since the winner is highlighted in the RafflePress dashboard, users can instantly see who’s won. This keeps your contest transparent and proves the prize draw was as fair as possible.

email the giveaway winner

After, you can create a thank you video recognizing everyone who took the time to enter. This will make your audience feel valued enough to enter again in the future and stay loyal to your channel.

Consider offering a consolation prize in the form of a unique discount code or voucher to keep your audience engaged.

Step 9. Learn From Your Results

One of the most important things you can do to increase your YouTube views with a giveaway is figuring out what did and didn’t work. That way, you can identify the contest promotion methods that resulted in the most channel views and use them in your next giveaway.

YouTube analytics dashbaord

You can find these metrics on your YouTube analytics dashboard. You can see the number of views your videos have, click-through rates, and more.

It’s also a good idea to measure your website’s traffic. The easiest way is to use MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to track visits to your giveaway landing page, traffic to your website, referral traffic, etc.

MonsterInsights overview report

Plus, you can view all that data from your WordPress dashboard without leaving your website. Even better, you can use MonsterInsights’ real-time data to monitor your giveaway while it’s running. Then you can make changes on the fly to improve your contest’s performance and drive more views on your YouTube channel.

That’s it!

We hope this article helped you learn how to increase YouTube views with a giveaway.

As you’ve learned today, when you create an online contest, you give your audience a fun way to engage with your brand. This results in more YouTube views, subscribers, and a larger relevant audience.

Click here to get started with RafflePress today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do giveaways help YouTube channels?

Yes, giveaways can significantly benefit YouTube channels. They can boost engagement by encouraging viewers to interact with your content, leading to higher visibility in YouTube’s algorithm.

Do giveaways increase subscribers on YouTube?

Yes, giveaways can indeed help increase subscribers on YouTube. As part of the giveaway rules, you can ask viewers to subscribe to your channel. This encourages new viewers who are interested in the giveaway to subscribe and can lead to a significant increase in your subscriber count.

Is it worth paying to promote your YouTube channel?

Paid promotion, such as YouTube ads or sponsored posts on social media, can help your channel reach a larger and potentially more targeted audience. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re just starting out and don’t have a large subscriber base yet.

And don’t forget to follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for more great tips to grow your business.

author avatar
Stacey Corrin Writer
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.

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