Monetize Your Blog, part 6: Giveaways!

Posted by: kimc on Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

start here:

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  1. Don’t do it for the money
  2. Take your time
  3. Get your own domain
  4. 13 Great ways to build your traffic
  5. Getting the goods

Have you read all 5 parts in this series so far?  I hope so, because this is where it begins to get exciting!

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Part 4 mentioned 13 ways to bring traffic to your budding blog, but I purposely left out another highly effective way to generate blog traffic: giveaways!  Combined with a product review as in part 5, a giveaway can be hugely exciting for your readers - and for you!

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How to host a giveaway

Hosting a blog giveaway doesn't have to be complicated, but you want to do it right.  Like a review, you want your giveaway to be beneficial for your readers as a group, because you want them to come back to your blog, and you want them to tell others about your blog.  They are the traffic you're working to gain.

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You want your giveaway to be beneficial for your winner.  If word gets out that the winner didn't receive her gift, or had to follow up 6 times to get it, or had to wait 4 months, or her gift arrived broken and she never received a replacement, who will want to enter your next giveaway?

You want your giveaway to be beneficial for yourself, because the whole reason you're doing a giveaway is to promote your blog.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, you want your giveaway to be beneficial for the sponsor who is providing the gift.  A well-run giveaway provides a great return on investment for your sponsor, and that encourages them to provide you with future giveaways.

For your readers:
  1. Choose gifts that are interesting and relevant to your readers. Make sure it's valuable enough to be worth their time and to get them excited about the possibility of winning.  Bonus points if it's something they were already thinking of buying.
  2. Ask for one for yourself. When you are hammering out your agreement with the sponsor, offer to do a review in conjunction with your giveaway.  This adds credibility to your giveaway because you can personally assure your readers that the gift is worth having!
  3. Make it easy to enter. If it's too complicated or there are too many strings attached, many people simply won't bother to enter - even if the gift is something they really want.  Keep it simple.
  4. Give extra entries. This is where you reward those who are willing to go the extra mile.  Give an extra entry for posting about the giveaway on their own blog, another if they share it on Facebook, another if they "like" the sponsor's Facebook page.  You get the idea.  Get your readers to help spread the word and generate more excitement about the giveaway.
  5. Don't forget to wrap it up. If anyone from my personal blog is reading this, they're probably laughing right now.  I am so bad at remembering to end my giveaways and choose a winner, I now give an extra entry to the first commentor who reminds me that the deadline has passed.
  6. Thank everyone for entering. Remind those who didn't win this time that their enthusiasm and willingness to participate makes it easier for you to host bigger and better giveaways in the future, increasing the chance that they will win something in one of your giveaways.
For your winner:
  1. Make sure gifts are truly free. No strings attached - no sales tax, no shipping charges, no additional purchase required.  A winner should never have to fork out cash to claim a gift.
  2. Make it easy to claim the gift. Not everyone comes back to check every giveaway they enter.  Do your best to notify your winner directly, and tell her exactly how to claim her gift.
  3. Mediate if necessary. Some sponsors are slow to respond to winners for one reason or another.  Be willing to go to bat for your reader if she needs help, since you have already established a relationship with the sponsor.
  4. Take a hit now and then. Did you forget to mention that the sponsor will only ship inside the US, and now you have a winner in Korea?  Offer to pay the extra shipping if the mistake was yours.
For yourself:
  1. Promote your blog. Remember those extra entries you were going to offer?  Use this opportunity to promote your blog.  Offer an extra entry for anyone who subscribes to your blog, links to you in their sidebar, etc.  Be creative!
  2. Make it easy to track entries and choose a winner. Require entrants to leave a separate comment for each entry, then use a random number generator (like Random.org) to pick your winner based upon the number of comments you received.
  3. Turn visitors into readers. We're going to talk about making your blog sticky next.  This is the essence of how you benefit from hosting giveaways - or from any new traffic.
For your sponsor:
  1. Drive traffic to them. Show them that your giveaway was worthwhile by driving traffic directly to their site.  Example: I often tell entrants to visit the sponsor's website, then leave me a comment saying which product they would choose if they won, or what is their favorite feature.  Give them a reason to browse the site and get to know the product(s).
  2. Promote it. Do whatever you can to make sure your giveaway receives plenty of interest.  Email your friends and family, asking them to enter.  You'll be doing each other a favor!  Ask online friends to help you out by mentioning the giveaway.  Tweet it, Facebook it, mention it on your favorite message board.  Start with your own circle of friends, wherever they may be, and move on from there.
  3. Extra entries help. Remember those extra opportunities to enter?  Many of them are directly helpful to your sponsor, but they also serve another purpose.  A casual looker might assume that a giveaway with 100 comments had 100 individual entrants.  This isn't the case, and I'm not encouraging you to mislead your sponsor, but more entries do suggest and demonstrate a higher level of interest and participation, and this is good news for a sponsor.

A well-run giveaway is very much like a review, whether or not you actually review the gift yourself.  Take another look at my tips on requesting free products and creating a review, because most of them apply to giveaways as well.  Make it interesting, exciting and easy for your readers, and you are on your way to seeing plenty of new faces around your blog.

Ah, but what next?  How can you encourage all those new visitors to come back?

Answer: You've got to make your blog sticky. If that makes you cringe like grape jelly on the kitchen cabinet, you've got some learning to do.  Come back for part 7, and learn why sticky needs to be your new best friend.

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Topics: make money

3 Responses to “Monetize Your Blog, part 6: Giveaways!”

Bambi Says:
May 24th, 2011 at 6:07 am

GREAT information! Thank you. What about promoting giveaways on giveaway sites such as Simply Stacy. Are they worth the time? I’m about to host my first giveaway, so I’m excited about this series :)

Susan Godfrey Says:
May 24th, 2011 at 9:08 am

Great information! I’m hosting a giveaway on my brand new blog and I wish I’d seen this post before then…lol! But it looks like I got all the items you mentioned covered, so that’s good :)

Super Frugalette Says:
May 24th, 2011 at 10:37 pm

Thanks for the tips. Online-Sweeps has a bloggers thread where sweepers gripe about blog giveaways. I read their complaints and learned much before hosting my own.

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