Learning from the Giveaways

In an effort to help give items away to readers I myself was caught in a few situations where the winners were either not contacted by the advertiser in a timely fashion, or the advertiser simply took too long or had poor response times. This will change my future method of doing sweepstakes, most of the giveaways I front the prize, buy it and ship it to the winner. But the ones where the advertiser sends prize directly to winner, I am going to have to come up with ways to get coupons ahead of time or more concrete ways of ensuring the winner gets contacted and their prize in a timely fashion.

This was one thing I liked about Sponsored Giveaways which is the platform that is running the Lenovo Z585 laptop giveaway on DragonBlogger right now, this system the award is uploaded ahead of time into the system and automatically given to the winner, there is no waiting for an advertiser to respond. This does mean however that the system only works to deliver cash or coupons to the winners, as they can’t do physical prizes. So the winner of the Lenovo Z585 Laptop actually gets a $570 Amazon Gift Certificate which is the cost of the laptop. Technically they could do whatever they want and buy whatever they want with the gift certificate, which would defeat the purpose of a laptop giveaway if they bought other items with it.

Meanwhile, I am glad that one of my advertisers did finally respond to the winners, I think that requiring advertisers to cc me in the notification to the winners is a requirement going forward so I an prove the advertiser contacted them in a timely fashion.

My latest giveaway from Web Hosting Buzz which went live yesterday on DragonBlogger the advertiser gave us coupon codes that the winners can use and get the package/prize right away so that will be a good thing for the winners.