Why I Still Use Gleam for Giveaways and Patterns of Behavior

I still love the Gleam.io giveaway platform and generally the flexibility makes it work for all types of giveaway situations.  But giveaways in and of themselves and how successful they are can greatly depend on the product being given away honestly. Tablets for my site still have a pretty good ROI but in general numbers are lower than with Punchtab and others due to better spam filtering and sheer saturation of the giveaway market as every company. Generally still able to get a .10 CPF (cost per follower) or better for most brands, but more important than Twitter/FB fans is getting those emails to add to a newsletter/marketing mailing list, which is part of my entry options. So getting 1,000 emails that you can send emails to is more advantageous to most brands than 1,000 FB followers. The other thing is it establishes brand partnership, I sell 10-20 Dragon Touch Tablets on Amazon from Tablet Express per month now due to their consistent 2 tablet a month giveaways, it helps connect people with the brand, establish patterns, recognition. I have had great success with them, and Anker and some others, but less with Havit who makes keyboards, headsets and mice, yet their counterpart UtechSmart I sell more mice, keyboards, tablets. I find it hard to predict why a user would buy one mouse/keyboard over another when both brands are same class/price range, so I can’t ever predict sales only raise awareness with my channels.

Facebook is sucking big time on pages lately, with the average post only getting seen by 1% of followers, I am really jumping in YouTube exposure and other methods of exposure besides Facebook. Our YouTube for example gets more traffic than the blog site now directly and some videos are just growing constantly.

For example with over 700 videos, some may get hundreds, and others tens of thousands of views, for some reason 1 Tablet model stood out and excelled against all other tablet models and not sure why really.

These are the 3 most successful videos related to a product on our YouTube Channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uwJ8dZaJQ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwNyIzCBQmw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqh4qq0_eI

So what we do is try to do more than 1 video of a product if it’s value is over $100 to increase chance of videos being noticed (usually unboxing and a review) and then a blog post as well with both videos. I also leverage Gleam to add unique entry actions for users.

Such as adding a product in Amazon to wish list, promoting an advertisement message for product on social media (not just enter to giveaway message), viral share of course is the standard, but reaching into other methods too, like watching a video as entry method (usually keep video short, and award 3 entries per minute of video).

The bottom line is unless you already have a ginormous following and your existing following 1-5% added as followers to your brand or emails for them to market to is enough to provide ROI, you are going to have to get creative to make sure you both reward your fans with a giveaway but provide enough of an ROI to your partner brand so that they want to keep coming back to give you more stuff to giveaway.

In addition pay attention to your Impress/Actions to User ratio, too many entry options and you could inflate a giveaway with thousands of entries, but only have a few hundred unique users, it is far more important to get unique entrants than high numbers of actions, this may make brand a bit crazy, as they want to see big numbers, but it is important to educate brands that actions is not necessarily the value if you have many entries per entrant, it is unique entrants.  Gleam does let not display entries publicly in the widget, and you may want to take advantage of this if you want to hide and only keep that info with you and your brand partner.

There my advice in a nutshell!