Ask Away Blog: 5 Keys to a Good Blog Giveaway

5 Keys to a Good Blog Giveaway

Monday, May 19, 2014

As a blogger, I'd like to think I know a fair amount of EFFECTIVE tips that I've learned over the past few years. After putting certain tips from other bloggers into action I literally watched my traffic grow every single day.  To me, that says that the tips I'm about to share with you WILL work IF you follow them!

So here are 5 keys to a good blog giveaway.

1. Use Rafflecopter or some other widget.
When you leave instructions for a giveaway that are part of the blog post it is overwhelming to readers and already looks like way too much work.  

Using an embeddable widget is a fantastic idea and the basic version of Rafflecopter is free. I LOVE RAFFLECOPTER! Please consider using it. There are so many benefits and it's much easier to choose a winner.

2. For the love of blogging...USE CLICKABLE LINKS!
WAY too often I find entries in Rafflecopter on a blogger's giveaway that look like this:
Follow on Instagram: 

They SHOULD instead look like this:

And here is how you should enter them in so that they turn into a link.  

The link title goes in brackets [like this] and immediately after the brackets you put your link in parantheses.

This makes it SO much easier for people to actually complete the entry plus there's a greater chance people will do THAT entry.   So do yourself and your sponsors a favor and PLEASE link everything!!!

3. Prize value should be over $20!
I'm sorry but anything under $20 really isn't worth the effort to most readers.  I know this because I've asked around.  Think about it... until you go to spend the $20 voucher on a website, you can really only get a $10-15 item if you want shipping to be covered by the voucher as well.

4. Disable blog comment approvals.
I hate when it asks me to type in "ksjdfals juiwe8932"  Half the time it's hard for me to see and decipher the captcha and I'm not a robot!

I don't use any kind of captcha check for my blog and you know what? I have maybe 1 spam comment a month get through.  All the rest go into my spam section. Please do yourself a favor and make it easier for readers to leave a comment as part of an entry.

5. Contact your winner directly.
I can't stress enough how professional it is to contact a winner directly by email.   These are some other ways I've seen it done and a reason why each isn't fair to the contestants.

Tweeting them with a time limit to claim prize - Not everyone can be on their Twitter at a moments notice (I've seen 5 minute deadlines!)

Posting that they won in a blog - I'm sorry but as loyal as I am to the blogs I follow, some days I can't check their blog, sometimes for a week because I'm so busy.

Announcing on Facebook - Um, hello, have you noticed yet how Facebook basically hides your page feed from A LOT of your followers?!  People have lives and if stuff isn't in their feed they normally don't see it because they don't visit someone's Facebook page everyday.

It takes 2 minutes to email a winner and not only is it the best thing for the reader but it looks extremely professional on your end!

REMEMBER: It's not just the reader that benefits from a giveaway, it's you and your blog if you can gain a follower from it!

I hope these tips help you! If you can think of any others please leave them below!

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  1. Hello! TJ here from the Indie Chicks group :) I'm happy to see that I've been doing a lot right with my giveaways haha. But! I've never heard about Rafflecopter before. This would've made my life a lot easier! I'm going to look into this a bit more. ^_^

    1. Hey TJ Nice to meet youuuu :) yea Rafflecopter is so easy ive used it for well over a year now!

  2. I use all of these tip when I host a giveaway.

  3. Thanks for sharing! I am about to run my first giveaway in a couple weeks, so these tips were very helpful!

  4. Great tips! I have been wanting to host a giveaway and I am going to be using all these to try and make it successful :)




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