If you are looking for ways to increase your blog’s presence and get more traffic, try hosting giveaways on your blog. Giveaways attract new readers, reward loyal followers and can promote your products and services. Giveaways are a win-win for everyone involved. Here are some tips for hosting giveaways on your blog:

Finding Prizes

Try putting yourself in the mindset of your readers. When deciding which prize to giveaway, ask yourself: what would you be excited to win?

• PR companies: Contact various PR firms and marketing companies. Request to be added to their press lists, noting that you’re interested in hosting giveaways for their clients’ products. What happens next? They will contact you when their client has a new product or service to promote.
• Contact the business: Contact vendors and purveyors directly. Ask if they are interested in sponsoring a giveaway on your blog. Treat this as a formal pitch for a partnership opportunity. Provide your blog’s traffic numbers to help illustrate the benefits for them to provide free goods.
• Buy it yourself: If there’s a product you’re really passionate about and you aren’t able to secure free items yet, you can always buy giveaway items yourself. This can get pricey but it could bring more traffic to your blog.

Choose a Theme When Hosting Giveaways

Coordinate your giveaways with upcoming holidays or organize them under a fun theme. You could offer a free order of Mother’s Day flowers from FTD.com or a gift basket of fresh smelling products for a Spring-themed giveaway. For a summer giveaway, a family pack of amusement park tickets or travel gear like new suitcases, could garner lots of participation. If your audience is mainly expectant and new moms. Plus you’ve been writing about the virtues of cloth diapers, a cloth diaper service giveaway would be an ideal opportunity.

Managing the Logistics

When managing entries and choosing a winner, keep it simple and don’t require too much of readers to give private information. Simple entries in the comment section of the post are more effective than requiring multiple steps to enter. ProBlogger recommends limiting the duration of the giveaway to one week, to prevent readers from losing interest. BusyMommyMedia.com advises using a random integer generator when hosting giveaways. Random.org chooses a number from the number of entries that you have.

WordPress also has a variety of plugins for contests like RafflePress and Contests by Rewards Fuel. RafflePress helps you collect email addresses to grow your subscribers. Contests by Rewards Fuel makes awarding additional entries for social shares easy by automating the social elements of your promotion and keeping track of how many times readers share your contest link with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

Giveaway Promotion

Get the most traffic out of your giveaway by promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and any other social outlets. Submit it to contest and giveaway blogs to reach an even wider audience.

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