Posts Tagged ‘giveaway’
6 Ways To Supercharge Your Blog Giveaway
Throwing a giveaway on your blog is a powerful way to attract new visitors and increase your traffic. People love freebies, and you’d be surprised how far some people will go to get their hands on them. Each giveaway that you host on your blog is an opportunity for you to get more traffic and links to your blog, so you shouldn’t waste any opportunity. I have seen many bloggers who give things away without getting the most out of their contest. Sure, you want to keep the rules simple and easy to follow. That does not mean you shouldn’t reward those visitors who are willing to go beyond everyone else and do all kinds of things to win something on your blog.
There are plenty of ways one can supercharge a blog giveaway. It really depends on your creativity. The below 6 methods should give some ideas though:
- Do not forget social media: if you have a Twitter profile or Facebook page, the least you can do is ask your visitors to join you on those sites. If you must, you can make it an optional entry. There are hundreds of people who have gained thousands of visitors by giving away iPads and other top gadgets. Don’t miss your chance.
- Ask Your Visitors to Blog: giving away things is a great way to gain incoming links to your blog. So ask your visitors to blog about your giveaway and share their link with you. Give them extra entries as an incentive. Read more »
How To Throw a Viral Contest On Your Blog
One of the best ways to generate extra traffic for your blog and get a major boost in the number of people who visit your blog is throwing viral competitions. Giveaways can always bring more people to your website as everyone likes freebies. Viral competitions are a bit different. Sure. You are giving away something to your visitors, but your goal is to spread the word about your blog and reach people you usually don’t reach with your everyday giveaways.
For your viral giveaway to work, you are going to need a killer gadget. Something that people want to own badly. The iPad comes to mind at this point, though the next generation X-Box or iPhone can all make great prizes as well. You can’t pull it off with a bag of chips or a t-shirt. That’s only one part of the equation. You have got to have a clear plan what you want your visitors to focus on. In most cases, it is always better to allow your visitors to enter your contest multiple times. You should have one main way for your visitors to enter your contest and add other channels that you want to target in your “extra credit” section.
Let’s say you want to spread the word about your blog on Facebook. That needs to be your “must-do” step for your competition. You can make other steps optional. Of course, since taking those steps increases the chances of winning the prize for your visitors, you can expect a lot of them to take those as well.
Don’t Be Cheap
Everybody wants to be a winner. When you have only one prize up for grabs, it may turn some visitors off. The more people your contest, the less chance each person has to win your contest. That’s why it always pays to have multiple prizes up for grabs. Let’s say an iPad as your main prize and a PS3 and a Xbox as your second and third place prizes.
Tracking Is Key
If you are allowing your visitors to enter your contest multiple times, you want to make sure you have a way to track their entries. One way to do this is by giving each visitor a unique URL. The easiest way to do that to somehow add the username of your visitors to the end of their URL. That makes the URL more recognizable to them and to you as well. Another way to do this is by asking your visitors to include their Twitter username with each step. Read more »
Blog Giveaways: The Foolproof Way To Drive Traffic To Your Blog
Most bloggers are obsessed about driving traffic to their websites. You can have the best content in the world, but if you are not getting any traffic to it, you are probably not going to get any recognition for it either. It’s always nice to be found by a Guy Kawasaki or get a tweet from Bill Gates, but let’s face it. That does not happen every day. Now there is an easy way to drive traffic to your blog that is not getting the attention it deserves — giveaways.
A lot of bloggers know their basics. They know competitions work well. They know giveaways work well. But they don’t make the right decisions when it comes to giving things away to their readers. I have seen so many bloggers who giveaway worthless things and expect their traffic to skyrocket. In reality, you should giveaway things that turns people on. Literally! I would be more excited about a Netbook or a Macbook Air than a junk book that nobody cares about. The monetary value is not everything here, but it could be very important. If you want to go viral, you want to giveaway something that a lot of folks care about owning.
Giveaways provide you with a unique opportunity to push your other web properties. Let’s say you have a Facebook and a Twitter account. You can ask folks to become your friend on Facebook and follow you on Twitter to get a chance at winning your competition. You should also ask your readers to re-tweet your blog post. That is a very powerful link building tool.
Giving away things on your blog is the probably the best way to raise awareness about your blog and keep people coming back for more. Now, blog giveaways are not something that you try and put aside after one or two try. Successful blogs constantly have competitions and giveaways. If your blog is popular enough, you can ask companies to sponsor your giveaways. In that case, why wouldn’t you want to give things away?
Stay tuned for Part II where I talk about how to put up a successful blog giveaway.
