If you’re an Etsy person, you might have heard about blog giveaways. You may even have been approached by someone who keeps a blog. They may have asked you to participate in a giveaway or to donate an item for a giveaway. But you should really consider doing your OWN blog giveaway – why not keep that wonderful link love for your own blog? Giveaways can be a fantastic way of advertising, if you do it right. Here are some things you can to do to help make your giveaways a success.
1. Host your own giveaway. You don’t have to wait for someone else to invite you to their blog – go ahead and host your own giveaway using your own item! Write a blog post about the item you’re giving away, the rules for entering, the deadline, and how you will choose the winner. One technique that people use a lot is to have the entrant visit your shop, select their favorite item, and come back and post a link to your item in their comment. This creates lots of links back to your shop, which is a desirable thing. Make your post as attractive as possible – tell a story about the item you’re giving away and put up a nice picture of it.
2. Publicize your giveaway. Get on Twitter and send a tweet about your giveaway with a link to the blog post. Announce your giveaway on Facebook, Myspace, and in the Promotions forum at Etsy. Mention your giveaway to your family and friends. And get your giveaway mentioned on giveaway sites like the Etsy Giveaways blog. Do a google search for other sites where you can enter a link to your giveaway. People love giveaways and before you know it, your entries will start flowing in.
3. Get your entrants to publicize your giveaway for you. This is where it really starts to get fun. Give your entrants extra entries for publicizing your giveaway for you and then coming back to your blog post to leave a comment about what they did. Give an entry for tweeting your giveaway with a link to your blog, another entry for blogging about your giveaway, and another for becoming your fan on Facebook or for following your blog. You will be surprised at how hard people will work for you if they really want your item.
4. Make sure your item is something really worth it. This is imperative – give away something nice! The nicer it is, the more people will fall all over themselves to get your item, and it *will* get talked about online. If you get a reputation for giving away nice things, people will remember and come back next time too. Think about it this way: doing giveaways is a way of advertising that works very well and is a long lasting mark on the Internet that people will find later when searching for items similar to yours. When I do giveaways, the retail price of the item averages around $40. That’s a small price to pay for that kind of exposure.
5. What kind of exposure can this bring? If you have a popular giveaway, sometimes the people who didn’t win will come and buy the item from your shop. What’s more, your giveaway stays in Google search results, and later one when someone is searching for an item like yours, it will come up in search results that much more often. I do a lot of giveaways with my personalized sterling dog tag bracelet, and when I ask people how they found my shop, many times it has been when they typed in a favorite inspirational phrase into Google, and one of my giveaways came up because I have people comment about what they’d like to have inscribed on their bracelet if they win!
5a. How to pick the winner (added by request of justgivemepeace on Etsy, thanks!): I use a random number generator and number each comment. That’s why it is important for everyone to leave one comment for each entry they get. Check out Random.org for a good random number generator. The first blog giveaway I did, I actually made slips of paper with numbers and had my daughter draw the winner out. You don’t have to choose your winner randomly – you can pick the best comment if you want, or think of some other way to do it. It’s your giveaway!
6. Your winners will publicize you later! If you give away something nice, your winners will talk about it later. They’ll tell other people where they got their item, and they may even take pictures of themselves with your item and blog about it. All in all, hosting a giveaway is a fantastic and affordable way to advertise, with long lasting good results.
Did I forget to mention anything? Ask away or share your own tips and hints for giveaways!
Sterling Personalized Dog Tag Bracelet
