Running a Blog Giveaway For Traffic

This is a guest post by Christi Daugherty who is writing for Mom Giveaways.

But Mom, everyone’s doing it! Why can’t I? Well, ladies (and gentlemen) you can, and its not as hard as you think.

There are a lot of reasons to host a giveaway on your blog. You may want to attract sponsors for the future, help promote an affiliate program, pull new readers to your blog, or even just give back to your readers. All of these reasons are great reasons to host a giveaway, you just need to pick one or more and get started.

Step One: Secure Product for Giveaway

There are multiple ways to secure products for giveaways. I will list a few of those ways, but remember to be creative and do what works best for you and your readers.

Working with PR Companies

If you are contacted by PR companies with a pitch to review their product, always ask for a giveaway product. Most PR companies will be happy to oblige, and even pick up shipping to your reader.

“I’m new to blogging and don’t have PR companies emailing pitches can I still get companies to sponser giveaways for my blog?” Absolutely! I suggest pitching to smaller companies about product reviews and giveaways. Let them know what your intentions are with the product that you would like to share with your readers, and a lot of the times that company will say yes. Don’t get discouraged if you are told no. It never hurts to ask.

What to do when you don’t have a company sponsored giveaway.

Buy something special for your own giveaway. When you spend your own money, you don’t have to jump through hoops for a company. You can giveaway a new iPad, or even a gift card to Starbucks, its totally up to you.

Have you written an ebook? Do you sew cute aprons? That’s great! Give one (or more) of these away. you will get great feedback on a product that you created, and that always feels better than promoting some other company.

Always remember that whatever product that you are giving away is promotional to that company, and yourself. Make sure that you get your facts straight in your blog post about the company and the product details. You don’t want to show a picture of your cute kiddo standing beside your minivan, and your readers think you are giving away the kid, minivan, or the cute outfit she’s wearing instead of the bow that’s in her hair.

Step Two: Set the Rules

Make a time line.

After you have decided on your product, schedule when you will run the giveaway post. Let the company know when your post is live. If the company is you, way to go! You let that company know before it was even up!

How long do I run my giveaway? There is nothing set in stone here. Some bloggers run their giveaway for a few hours, a day, a few days, a week or even a month. Do whatever you think. Most of your participants will sign up in the first few days, so always keep that in mind.

Who pays shipping to your reader?

These days most companies pay for the shipping, but sometimes that doesn’t happen. You must put this detail in your blog post. It’s also a big deal if you are in the U.S. and the product is in Canada, and the winner is in Germany. Be sure to let your readers know if they are eligible for the giveaway. International shipping rates can be rather high in some cases, and there are a lot of other international shipping laws that you may need to consider.

Step 3: Entries and Winners

This is a topic all on its own. You can have 1 way that your readers can enter your giveaway, or you can have a dozen. Experiment with this to see what works for you.

Entry examples to use for your giveaway

• Comment on this blog post
• Subscribe to this blog (RSS or Email)
• Comment on this post about your favorite product from sponsoring company’s website
• Follow me on Twitter
• Follow me on Google Friend Connect
• Follow me on Networked Blogs
• Like my Facebook Page
• Add my button to your blog
• Post about this giveaway to your blog
• Tweet about this giveaway

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to enter giveaways, and some blogs give multiple entries for subscribing or writing blog posts. Remember that you are in charge here, but if you ask for the readers first born child they will likely close the tab.

How do you pick a winner?

The easiest way is to go to Random.org and let it do all of the work. It really only takes seconds, and is totally 100% fair.

Step 4: Promote, Promote, Promote

Once your giveaway is posted, you need to promote it. Tweet about it, ask your friends to tweet about it, post it to your Facebook page. If you go to Google Blog search you can find over 800k results for “giveaway link up”. What’s that? You add a short description of your giveaway and the url to a page of other giveaways so that people looking to enter giveaways can find you. It’s free to do all of this, just takes time.

Submit your giveaway to Mom Giveaways. They have a free submission option on their website and your contest will be exposed to 1000+ weekly blog readers. If you want extra exposure they also have some low cost ads and email blast options.

With the full treatment your giveaway can accomplish all the goals you’ve set for it.