How to Run a Successful Giveaway on Your Blog

Last Updated: June 25, 2013

Did you know you can embed Gleam into blog posts? Here's our top tips for success.

We’ve been rolling out plenty of features in the last few weeks here at Gleam & we’re finally ready to start a round of beta tests with some Bloggers.

We understand that Bloggers represent a huge driving force behind giveaways on the web & we truly believe that with their feedback we can continue to build one of the best possible platforms for giveaways.

What is Gleam?

If this post is the first time you’ve heard about Gleam then I suggest you read our previous post: What is Gleam.

We are building a suite of applications that make it easier for you to incentivize users to perform that actions you want them to. Our first app to market is Giveaways, we have quite a few more in development.

What are Actions?

Our entire philosophy around the concept of actions. Actions can be anything you want, here’s an example of some of the common ones:

Follow on Twitter
Visit on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest
Viral Sharing Something (Twitter, Facebook & Pinterest)
Blog Comment
Newsletter Signup
Read or Visit a Specific Page
Mention Something in a Blog Post
Download
Sign / Create Account
Use a Coupon

Many of the competition platforms on the market revolve around “entries” whilst we still do this on the frontend, on the backend you get more visibility of the actual actions you generate.

Here’s an example:

Learn More

You'll notice how you can weight the value of certain actions better by including them higher or giving them a higher entry worth.

Our Giveaway Formats

One of the areas we’ve been working hard on is ensuring that our giveaways look clean & beautiful. So that anyone can create one, integrate it into their site & it will compliment the theme or style of their site. Here’s some of the formats that are available right now:

Embed in Blog Posts

Designed specifically for bloggers, you can take your competition then embed it directly into any blog post. You can scroll to the bottom of this post to see this live in action.

Run Across Your Entire Site

Sometimes when giveaways are buried in a blog post they get missed by the majority of your readers. We allow you to run the giveaway across all your pages using our Gleam tab.

You can see it in action on the right.

Run as a Standalone Page

If you don’t have a blog you can always create a page right here on Gleam for you competition, don’t worry we do our best to help you make it look amazing.

Supported Entry Options

How your users actually enter your giveaway is extremely important, we now support over 100 different ways for a user to enter.

Check them out below:

Subscriber Database

As you run more competitions we allow users to opt-in to receive notifications about your Giveaways. Right now on average 34% of users opt-in, this means that every time you launch a new promotion those users will get an email right away – plus, since they’ve used the platform before they’ll only need to perform a few clicks to enter 🙂

Ready To Run Your Own Competition?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Competition or get started right away!

Giveaway Templates

We've got a ton of contest, sweepstakes, & giveaway templates that are pre-made and customised to each industry. From E-commerce, live-streaming, to SaaS businesses, we've created a template suitable for each occasion: