We’ve not done an article like this in a while, so thought we would get this one posted up, many of you who read the Blazing Minds posts will have seen we love to run competitions and giveaways, so we thought we would bring you a little information on how you can run a competition/giveaway on your own website.

If you’ve blogged for a long time or even if you have only just started, then no doubt you are watching the “numbers” and trying to get an increase in stats for your site and even for your social media.

There are several methods that can help you build a bigger following and also bring over more readers for your blog from the world of Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

One of the key elements for Blazing Minds is giveaways or competitions, which ever word you prefer, both really do the same thing and they are a fantastic way of building up your numbers.

So I thought I would take a moment to bring you some tips on how you can make a competition/giveaway work for you and your blog, be it a new blog or one that has gone for a while and needs a little boost.

Now I know that there are many of you out there that do reviews on your blogs for many things, lot’s of bloggers do get stuff as freebies in exchange for an honest review and there is nothing wrong with that, that’s how Blazing Minds works, but what about getting more for your readers.

If you already do reviews for products, you already have your foot in the door, it’s just a matter of asking the companies to work with you on a giveaway.

But how can you get started with giveaways for your blog?

Well to be honest, it’s a lot easier than you actually think it is and all it takes is finding a brand to work with and one that your blog niche is connected with.

Do make-up reviews? Ask the company that supplies the make-up if they would like to work with you to promote them and yourself.

So, OK, let’s get on to the list of 7 that is in the title, hopefully these will help you along.

7 Steps for Running a Giveaway on your Blog

Get your website statistics. This is a very important part for working with brands, they need to see that you have a good reach, not only on your website but also on your social media. If you have CPanel on your hosting, you can use AWStats for your website stats, if you are using WordPress you can also get your stats for your blog on your Admin panel.
For your Twitter, you can use Twitter Analytics, this is a fantastic way of seeing what’s happening on your Twitter from your top tweet to your best follower and so much more, also join the likes of SumAll, this will show you your “Reach”, the bigger the reach the better.

Find out your Domain Authority via a site like moz.com, brands do like a DA (Domain Authority) of 40 or more and check your Alexa rank, brands still use this for their stats to find sites for advertising, the closer you are to 100K the better, if you are below 100K then better still.

Get all your stats and make a PDF of them for reference.

Find the brands you want to work with and contact them, most companies will have an email for “press” or even just using their standard contact email, don’t forget to sell yourself to them in your email, adding your stats to show the reach and potential they have, very much like you would when getting in touch with them to do reviews. Now wait for them to make a decision.

  1. Decide how you are going to run your giveaway, Twitter, Facebook or other option, depending on what you want to build is the option you go for, sites such as Gleam and RaffleCopter are ideal to help to run your giveaway.
  2. Write your giveaway article on your website, make it interesting, eye-catching and give it a headline that grabs the attention of your readers etc. Tease your reader’s followers with news that you are about to start a competition.
  3. Add a widget to your website where people can enter your latest giveaway.
  4. Launch your competition, tell all your readers about it via your newsletter, tweet about it, post an update on Facebook, also use other social media sites such as Pinterest and Instagram to get the word out.
  5. There are lots of people (compers) looking for competitions to enter, make sure you add your competition to sites such as NinjaWin, PrizeFinder and Competition Database, do a few and you will find that “compers” will subscribe to your website and start adding them for you.
  6. Make sure you promote your new competition on a regular basis, tweet about the prize with hash tags to get the new giveaway to  spread even further. Make sure you tell people when the giveaway is coming to an end and even give it a final countdown on the last day with tweets to your followers.
  7. Announce the close of your competition, contact the winner and send them their prize, also ask them for a tweet etc of them with their prize, that way you get a nice bit of promo for yourself in the process.

So there you have it folks, running a competition/giveaway is easier than you think, so I do hope that this has given you the incentive to look into running one for your website.

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