Chelsea, from Married Filing Jointly has joined me today to give you guys the lowdown on using giveaways to grow your blog! Thanks so much, Chelsea! Be sure to check out her blog after you read this awesome post.
If you want to ensure that you get a bunch of page views, and are looking for new followers, an excellent way to gain them is by organizing a blog giveaway. Blog giveaways attract a high traffic volume and also help make your blog more popular all while sharing about a product or service with readers.
How to Grow Your Blog with Giveaways
What Are Giveaways?
If you are a relatively new blogger, you may not know anything about hosting a giveaway. Giveaways are small contests that are organized by bloggers. They aim at increasing awareness and publicity of their blog. To win an item, you can ask people to like your page, post comments, interact, etc. You can also give your opinions about the product you are giving away and ask people to visit an Etsy shop where the product is sold, Facebook page, etc. After people have entered into your giveaway and left comments, you can randomly pick a winner and send them their prize.
Having a promotional giveaway is great for your advertisers as well, as doing so greatly helps them promote their business. It’s a fact that when an individual receives a free product or service and they love the product, they are more likely to buy it the next time around, and also become a loyal fan and follower of your blog.
Setting up a Giveaway
Although there are many ways to go about setting up a giveaway, I usually start by having a company who is willing to offer up a product as a giveaway to my readers. Often this is done in cohesion with a product review. For example, either I will contact a company or a company will contact me and ask me to review a product on my site. In turn they will send me a free product to review. I always start by asking the company if they would also be interested in hosting a giveaway on my blog as this will increase the amount of people who read my review post. The product can vary in price. Sometimes, the company offers a product and sometimes they offer a giftcard to their store. Either way is fine.
You can always purchase an item you think your readers would like to giveaway as well.
If a company contacts you about doing a blog post about their company, ask them to sponsor a giveaway! It will give their post more views!
Once you have the company and product selected you can set up the giveaway. Although there are several ways to go about setting up a giveaway I use Rafflecopter, which is a free service that tracks all your entries for you and will automatically select a winner for you at the end of the giveaway. Once I embed the Rafflecopter html code into my post, I go ahead and write the review of the product and make the post live.
Then I begin to advertise. The key to hosting a giveaway is in the advertising. I post updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Google + daily to remind those who follow me to enter to win. When you tweet out a reminder make sure you hashtag #giveaway.
There are tons of websites out there that advertise blog giveaways for free. Enter your post in as many of these websites as possible. Sites include Someday Crafts Giveaway Directory and Blog Giveaways.
Another great idea is to have an entry (on the Rafflecopter) for when participants share the giveaway on their Facebook, blog, Twitter, etc. This gives your giveaway more exposure, in turn giving your blog more exposure.
One important fact to point out is to be sure to only host giveaways for products and services your readers would like. For example, I would not want to post a giveaway and review of a stroller since I do not have kids yet.
When used properly, giveaways are a wonderful way to gain followers and advertise great products!
What are your giveaway tips?
What are your giveaway tips?
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