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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Do you want to know how to run a blog giveaway? Blog contests and giveaways are an excellent way to do something positive for your audience while growing brand awareness. But how do you create a giveaway on your blog, and what mistakes should you avoid?
This article will show you how to run a blog giveaway while avoiding the most common mistakes. But first, think about why running a giveaway on your blog is such a great idea.
Almost every type of blog runs contests. Some bloggers run blog contests and giveaways as part of paid brand partnerships, for example, a beauty blog giveaway working with makeup brands. Yet, others do it to fill a gap in their content calendars.
But the big question is, why should you set up a great giveaway on your blog?
Look at it this way; if you’re posting regular content, you’re generating far more organic traffic to your blog than your Facebook page or Twitter profile. Therefore your blog is the perfect place to reach an audience of targeted users.
With this in mind, here are a few more reasons why you should run a giveaway for your blog:
As you can see, running a giveaway has tons of potential for growing your blog and doing something fun and exciting for your audience. Some of the best blog giveaway ideas can hugely affect your business’s bottom line.
Now let’s look at setting up a giveaway on your blog that your visitors will love.
So which platform is best for giveaways?
While each online platform has its pros and cons, we believe that your business website is the best platform for giveaways. Conversely, if you’re running a blog giveaway, you can’t go wrong with a WordPress website.
To host a contest on your blog, follow the steps below. They’ll walk you through the entire process, from choosing the best WordPress giveaway tool to picking a winner for your contest.
Let’s get to it!
The first step is to pick a blog giveaway tool to make running your blog contest easy and efficient. There’s a wide range of contest tools available, and if you’d like an overview, check out our comparison of Rafflecopter vs. Gleam vs. RafflePress here.
Yet, for this tutorial, we’ll use RafflePress, the best WordPress giveaway plugin for bloggers.
Since most bloggers use WordPress, RafflePress is the best choice because it’s built from the ground up for WordPress users.
For bloggers, what that means is an easy way to build and host your giveaway. There are built-in social sharing features to grow your blog, increase followers, and attract more website traffic.
The ready-made contest templates help you get up and running with just a few clicks. To help you get started, here’s everything you need to know to create an online contest with RafflePress.
Next, it’s time to decide what prize you’ll offer your readers.
When choosing a giveaway prize, keep in mind some essential things. Your prize should first be something that encourages people to enter your contest. That means it must be relevant to your audience and something desirable enough to spur them into action.
For example, blogs based on book reviews can consider running a book giveaway with an amazon gift card, or if you’re a beauty blogger, a bundle of big-ticket beauty products would be an excellent prize.
Keep in mind that while gift card giveaways are quick and easy to run, they might not be desirable enough to generate lots of traffic. Higher-value items like a prize pack are typically more popular.
Related: What Happened to Amazon Giveaways? (+ How to Still Run Them)
Secondly, you need to make it crystal clear what winners will receive. That means having the prize written in the contest title, headings, descriptions, and any Linky lists.
You should also include details on how many winners you’ll choose, the number of prizes on offer, and the total prize value. Including the value of the prize in your heading or description is further encouragement that makes people not want to miss out on the chance of winning.
After choosing a prize for your giveaway, you should ensure it’s easy for blog visitors to enter for the chance to win. When using RafflePress to create a competition on your blog, you can ask people to complete many actions to earn entries.
The best giveaway actions for your blog are:
You can also use RafflePress’s giveaway actions to promote your blog on social media. For instance, users can earn bonus entries by:
You can even ask other bloggers to write a blog post to enter your giveaway.
Now that you know why having a clear prize is essential, let’s put together the perfect blog post for your giveaway.
Your blog post encourages readers to engage and enter when running a blog competition. If your content isn’t interesting enough, they’ll click away from your post and move on to the next blog.
Think about ways to showcase the prize and how winning it can somehow enrich people’s lives.
Let’s look at our previous example of a beauty giveaway.
Ask the question, “why do people visit a beauty blog“?
The answers are:
So those are the things you should tap into when writing your blog post. Figure out how winning your prize could solve your readers’ problems and build your post around them.
Here are a few ways you can create your giveaway blog post:
When you’ve created your blog post, move on to putting together the rules for your blog giveaway.
Every successful contest has a clear set of rules for participants to follow. Rules keep your prize draw legal and fair to all entrants. They also help weed out people looking for a quick win that requires little effort.
Here’s a list of things to consider including in your rules disclaimer:
Also, make it clear if your contest is sponsored or affiliated with a business or brand to maintain transparency.
Next, you need to add your rules to your giveaway. RafflePress makes this easy with the Giveaway Rules Generator, and it’s an excellent place to start if you’re unsure what to include.
The Rules Generator asks you several questions about your contest, then instantly turns them into a complete set of contest rules you can display in the RafflePress widget.
Here’s how to access the generator in RafflePress and add them to your giveaway.
First, go to your RafflePress giveaway and click Edit.
Then click Settings » Giveaway Rules.
When you click the Generate Rules button, you’ll see the questionnaire mentioned above, where you can add your contest details.
Afterward, click the Generate Rules button for RafflePress to generate a set of rules automatically.
Click Save, and RaflePress’ll add them to your contest.
You can also copy and paste those rules into the body of your blog post to make them clearer to participants.
You can add your contest to your blog now that you’ve created a clear set of instructions and rules.
Adding your giveaway to your WordPress blog is pretty straightforward. RafflePress lets you embed your contest into any post or page using a WordPress content block or shortcode.
To add your contest to a WordPress post, head to the post you prepared earlier and click Edit.
Then click the plus icon in the WordPress editor to add a new content block and search for RafflePress.
This will reveal the RafflePress block. So go ahead and click it to add it to your blog post.
Then choose your blog giveaway from the drop-down list to embed your contest.
Now it’s all ready to publish!
Alternatively, you can publish your contest on a giveaway landing page to reduce distractions and focus people on entering.
You can do this by heading to your giveaway in RafflePress and clicking Edit. Then head to Settings » General.
Add URL parameters for your contest in the Page Permalink box. Then click Save.
You can send visitors to that URL to enter when your giveaway starts. This is a great way to share your contest on other platforms besides WordPress, as all you need is the landing page link.
Once you’ve launched your blog giveaway, it’s time to promote it. Promoting your contest exposes it to a broader audience, boosting its reach and attracting more participants.
Here are a few ideas you can use to promote your giveaway:
Check out this guide we put together for even more contest promotion ideas.
Now that you know how to promote your contest let’s learn how to pick a winner.
There are several ways to draw a winner for your giveaway. Although you should note that it largely depends on the type of contest you’re running.
Most competitions draw winners randomly, whereas the number of votes determines voting contest winners. Competitions with a panel of judges, on the other hand, will need to be decided by the panel.
For this tutorial, let’s focus on drawing a winner randomly, which you can quickly achieve with RafflePress.
When your contest has ended, head to the RafflePress dashboard and navigate to the contest that needs a winner. Then click Needs Winners.
Then you’ll see a page asking you to choose from the following options:
Then go ahead and click the Choose Winners Now button.
The winner of your blog giveaway will be highlighted in the list of entrants, as shown below. Then you can click to email the lucky winner with the good news.
Congratulations, you’ve now successfully run a blog giveaway and picked the winner!
It’s fantastic that you know how to run a blog giveaway now. But don’t stop reading just yet. Plenty of bloggers make mistakes that are pretty easy to avoid. So we’ve covered them below to prevent you from making the same errors.
The biggest mistake most bloggers make is not understanding the goal of their giveaway. Your giveaway’s goal determines the results you’ll get, so the results will be poor if you pick a goal that doesn’t align with what you want to achieve for your blog.
Let’s break it down a little. Each type of contest generates a different result. For example, subscriber contests are for growing your email list, and social sharing contests increase your blog traffic.
If you don’t understand your goal, choosing a contest type that works is hard. So take some time to fully understand your end goal and craft a contest that suits it.
Another common mistake is not letting your email list know that you have a contest running. Most bloggers are growing their lists to help drive traffic to their blogs, so failing to tell them is a huge missed opportunity.
Your subscribers are likely to open your emails because they took action to sign up for your list. This means they’re more likely to click through and enter your giveaway.
As soon as your contest is live, send an email out, broadcasting the fact to get your readers clicking. You could even offer a coupon for successfully entering.
Related: 15 Expert Tactics to Get More Blog Comments
The next mistake we see bloggers making is not submitting their giveaways to contest directories and sweepstake websites.
These sites are built specifically for listing and promoting competitions. Because thousands of people flock to these sites to find and enter contests, there’s the potential to reach a much bigger audience of active users than you would without it.
So what are the best places to promote your blog giveaway? Check out this list of the best sweepstakes and contest directories to find out.
Besides promoting your giveaway on social media once, it’s worth setting a schedule to post regularly over the time it’s running. Doing so keeps your content visible in people’s news feeds and reminds them to enter if they haven’t already done so.
What’s more, most social media networks have insights and analytics to track who’s engaged with your content so you can measure the ongoing success of your promotions.
Effective promotion on sites like Instagram can help your contest go viral. You can learn all about how to go viral on Instagram here.
Earlier, we mentioned the importance of choosing a relevant prize for your blog contest. And despite the advice available, many people make the mistake of offering a prize their readers aren’t interested in.
An irrelevant prize like a low-value item, for example, doesn’t excite people enough to enter. And in the same way, the wrong prize won’t attract the kind of audience that sticks around on your blog after the contest has ended.
It’s tempting to get it published and over with as quickly as possible when running a blog contest. Let’s face it; you’re a busy blogger with lots to do.
But if your contest duration isn’t long enough, you won’t have enough time to spread the word and attract new entries. This can lead to fewer entries and poor results in terms of traffic and subscribers.
Instead, run your giveaway for a reasonable time. Aim for at least a week or 2 to maximize your results.
On the flip side, it’s easy to make the mistake of running your giveaway for too long. And if you do this, you risk people losing interest and even forgetting that they entered in the first place.
Similarly, a competition that runs too long has no sense of urgency and doesn’t encourage people to enter quickly for fear of missing out.
With that in mind, we’d suggest running blog giveaways and contests for no longer than a month.
Do you need some inspiration to help you get started? Here are some blog contest and giveaway ideas you may find helpful:
Check out these winning contest ideas for more inspiration.
And there you have it!
In this article, you’ve learned how to run a blog giveaway and the mistakes you should aim to avoid.
If you liked this article, why not look at our guide on driving traffic to your website here.
And if you want to learn about other contest types, take a look at these tutorials:
And please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for RafflePress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
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