The Art of the Blog Giveaway (Part Three): Creating a Win-Win-Win Situation

So you’ve gotten a brand to give away something. Now there are some points you should probably hammer out before you agree to do the giveaway. Here are a few of them. This list is by no means exhaustive.

1. How many of the product are they willing to give away? I’ve learned this is important. As my blog readership grew, I noticed at a point that the entries in my giveaway dipped a bit. My first clue came from a person who posted not wanting to enter yet another contest she wouldn’t win. Nowadays I usually require at least three of any given product be given away. And I can negotiate that point because…I keep analytics on my giveaways! So I can prove that a giveaway with more prizes is more effective. It’s hard to argue with the numbers.
2. Who is going to ship the prize? I am a firm believer that it should (almost) never, ever, EVER be you. That being said, you should probably put in the terms of your giveaway some sentence about having to share the winners physical and/or email address with the sponsoring company. Just to cover your butt. But big companies don’t pay that much for shipping because they ship in volume. Unless they are paying you to ship their product, don’t spend your money shipping it!
3. If your giveaway is paired with a review and/or photos, videos, etc. what are they going to do with them? And who “owns” them? You may give brands complete permission to re-share the content generated from your contest or you could limit it. On first glance many will say “why would I limit it?” Well take my blog for instance. Many people who have had weight loss surgery haven’t told everyone in their lives and don’t want to. These people probably would not enter a contest where their face might show up all over the internet as the winner of MY giveaway (bariatric as a word means weight loss surgery). So you have to judge for yourself what privacy level tolerance your audience has and decide accordingly.
4. What will does the brand need out of this deal? Are they looking for people to like their Facebook Page? Follow them on Twitter? Have your readers share their message? (This is common in niche audiences like mine.) What do they want people to do to win the prize? Of course, you have final authority.

Which brings me to my next subject. Requirements for entry. They should, in some way, be beneficial to you as well. This can happen in many different ways. You could require that people like your Facebook page along with the brands or follow you on Twitter. Just note that you cannot require any of these things ON Facebook or Twitter. Use an app like Rafflecopter to manage it. Facebook and Twitter have very specific rules prohibiting the promotion of likes/follows on their sites.

You can even use a brand’s giveaway to create income earning opportunities. Indulge me a personal case study.

I wrote a book on making protein shakes. I sell it on Amazon. As with any author, I wanted my book to sell. I also had a bunch of sample sized products brands sent me. I usually agree to take boxes of samples for random giveaways. Yes, I know this means I’m shipping things myself but follow me on this one.

So I did a contest asking people who’d bought my book to leave an Amazon review within a specified period of time. Didn’t matter if it was a good or a bad review, just leave a review. Everyone who did that in the time frame outlined was entered to win a goodie box of samples.

Well I don’t think I knew at the time how many levels of success I’d see, but let’s count them.

1. I posted the link to the book so that people could enter the giveaway by leaving a review.
2. This created a non-contrived way for me to post the link to the book several times a day, thus raising awareness about it.
3. People who bought the book, clicked through to leave their review and enter. People who hadn’t bought the book clicked through to check it out (and my book is available for preview so they probably perused it a bit).
4. Those who entered all left good comments (because the book is awesome #vanity).
5. Those good comments have caused Amazon to return my book in more search results.
6. And I gave away swag from brands that I know and love, thus giving me a chance to promote the brands I work with while promoting myself.

So that’s what I mean when I say even a free promotion can benefit you. It doesn’t have to be something you are selling. Pair your giveaway with good content people need to share or respond to. If you have Google AdSense you’ll likely watch your revenue spike and if you have affiliate accounts, be prepared for those to get some action as well.

At the end of it all I ended up making way more money off that promotion than what I charge for doing a giveaway. Enough, even, to offset the cost of mailing the prizes. So with a little brainpower you CAN harness giveaways in your favor.

I would be remiss to point out, though, that a good giveaway is measured in more than just money. With every giveaway I do I gain a bigger audience, which helps get the “big fish” to want to interact with me.

Ok I promised do’s and don’ts in negotiating a giveaway.

Do:

• Come to a mutual and explicit understanding with a brand of exactly what you’ll be giving away (size of product, amount of product, etc.). I remember once I agreed to do a giveaway thinking a company was giving away full-sized product only to have to deal with angry readers who got sample sizes. Not a good look.
• Ask the brand to ship the product direct, unless it’s more beneficial for you to ship it for some reason (there are not many instances where that is the case)
• Ask the brand to pair their review/giveaway with some sort of sale promotion that is branded to your site. For instance, on my blog I'll often pair a review/giveaway with a promotion from the brand offering a percentage off their orders from the brand's site using the discount code "BARIATRICFOODIE." Now if you can negotiate a portion of those sales, great. If you can't there's still a benefit in that this is a measurable way to demonstrate your social media reach. If your campaign is particularly successful the brand will come back again and likely pay you again to promote future products.
• Make sure that, again, there is a benefit to your readers, the brand AND YOU. This should be a win-win-win scenario. If it isn’t go back to the drawing board.

But don’t:

• Get discouraged if a company wants you to initially do a promotion for free. You can try to negotiate them into something (even more free product for you if you like it), but if it’s a company you could see yourself working with in the future, my advice is to be gracious. But the next don’t underscores how you get around that next time.
• Forget to take analytics!!!! The numbers are your friend. At minimum you should record where the brand was before you got involved (# of Facebook likes, Twitter follows, etc.) versus when your promotion ends. In my case I often employ some device to track exactly how many people visited from my audience (for instance if I were doing a Nike giveaway an entry option would be to post on the Nike Facebook page and say “I’m a Bariatric Foodie and I love Nike!”). I usually make this a bonus entry, considering privacy issues.
• Give away something you can’t stand behind. Vet your products, people. I cannot say that enough!!!

And a bonus do (and I'll do a post about this in this series): Do remember to use an FTC disclaimer on your giveaway. You don't want the Feds coming after you!

So now that we’ve negotiated ourselves a good deal, next time let’s I’ll talk about a few giveaways I’ve done and how they were structured. Some were successful. Some not so much. But either way there’s something to learn from them!