How to Run a Successful Blog Giveaway

Published on June 1, 2025; Updated on July 11, 2025

Running a blog giveaway is one of the most effective ways to build your email list, boost brand awareness, and increase engagement.

If you’re looking for one of the easiest ways to drive traffic, grow your email list, and build brand awareness — blog giveaways are one of the most effective tactics available. Whether you're launching a new product, celebrating a milestone, or simply trying to engage your readers, running a giveaway is a low-cost way to create high-impact results. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to host a giveaway on your blog successfully, including prize ideas, promotion tips, and how to use Gleam’s giveaway tools to get started quickly.

What Is Gleam?

Gleam is a marketing platform that allows you to easily host a giveaway on your blog or website. With over 100 supported entry methods and custom integrations for major social media platforms, Gleam is used by bloggers, brands, and creators around the world to boost engagement and grow their email subscriber base. You can embed Gleam giveaways into any blog post, publish them on a dedicated landing page, or display them across your entire site using the Gleam tab widget.

Why Blog Giveaways Work

Giveaways and contests are effective because they create urgency, encourage user generated content, and build community. When you run the giveaway properly, you're not just collecting entries — you're collecting emails, boosting social reach, and converting new visitors into long-term readers. Many successful bloggers use giveaways to:

Grow their email list
Promote seasonal content
Reward loyal followers
Launch or test a new product or service

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:

How to Host a Giveaway on Your Blog (Step-by-Step)

Write a blog post announcing the giveaway. Clearly explain the rules, prize, and end date.
Embed the Gleam widget in the post (or use a full-screen landing page if you prefer).
Promote your giveaway on email, social media, and through partner blogs.
Ask users to enter to win by completing actions like following you, sharing the giveaway, or signing up to your email list.

When the campaign ends, randomly choose your lucky winner using Gleam’s built-in drawing tool.

Giveaway Formats You Can Use

With Gleam, you have multiple flexible ways to present your giveaway:

Embed the Giveaway 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.

Great for recurring giveaways or evergreen offers

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, drive traffic and build loyalty.

Check them out below:

Promote Your Giveaway Like a Pro

To get the most out of your blog giveaway:

Promote it on your blog’s homepage or sidebar
Share it on your social media platforms
Email your existing email list subscribers
Partner with other bloggers for cross-promotion

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 🙂

How to Choose a Prize That Converts

To run a successful giveaway, you need a prize that’s both desirable and relevant to your audience. This ensures high engagement and leads to quality entries.
Smart prize ideas for bloggers:
Gift cards (always flexible)
Brand merchandise or kits
Ebooks, premium content, or early access
A featured post or shout-out for other bloggers
When you choose a prize, always ask: will this attract the kind of people I want on my list?

Ready To Run Your Own Competition?

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

Try Our Giveaway Tools + 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:

Hosting a blog giveaway isn’t just a fun engagement tactic — it’s a serious growth tool. Done right, it helps you build trust, grow your audience, and hit your marketing goals faster. Use Gleam to run a social media-ready campaign, drive entries, and deliver a smooth experience from start to finish. Whether you're looking to drive traffic, gain email subscribers, or promote a new post, this is the tool to scale your blog’s reach in just a few clicks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Embed a Gleam widget directly into your blog post or use a hosted landing page to run a giveaway that tracks entries and actions automatically.

Choose prizes that resonate with your audience, such as gift cards, ebooks, or branded merchandise, to ensure higher engagement and quality entries.

Giveaways incentivize users to subscribe to your email list in exchange for entries, leading to a significant increase in qualified subscribers.

Promote your giveaway through your blog, social media, email newsletters, and collaborations with influencers to maximize reach and participation.

Yes, Gleam allows you to host giveaways on standalone landing pages, eliminating the need for a dedicated blog post.