Running a Successful Blog Contest

Even as I enter the last day for the Kindle Fire Giveaway on DragonBlogger.com I know this was my most successful blog contest I have ever run.  It isn’t just that the prize was awesome, I mean giving away 2 Free Kindle Fire’s is a great prize but I was able to harness Rafflecopter to run the contest and keep track of the entries.

This made overhead and management of each entry so much easier, I didn’t have to track Twitter hashtags, or find out how many retweets from users.  This was all handled by Rafflecopter for me.

I also had some amazing success in bringing fans to my sponsors, even before the contest ended I brought over 300+ likes to one of my sponsors fanpages and over 300+ Twitter followers.  This is in addition to having their links displayed on more than a dozen blog post entries for the contest.

I have learned how others have leveraged Rafflecopter and giveaway contests to build massive follower numbers for their Fanpages and such too.  I am going to use this information to create more contests to build larger social networks for future contests and idea’s as well.  Did you know I saw one Rafflecopter contest that had over a quarter of a million entries!

I will be doing a more detailed analytics report of the contest on my tech blog, but I am SUPER HAPPY with the Kindle Fire Giveaway contest and think it went very well.

Here are the steps to a successful blog contest

• Awesome Prize (A given)
• Know your target audience for the prize
• Decided how contest will be (random draw / Rafflecopter)
• Make YouTube video’s for your contest (this is a big plus)
• Give entries for people who share/spread the word about the contest
• Give extra entries for people willing to write blog posts, do YouTube video’s and extra to spread the contest word.
• Market your contest on Facebook fanpages for the prize
• Market your contest on all Social Media you can
• Repeat the process for future contests and keep growing until they organically grow larger and larger.
• (Sometimes you may need to pay for a little advertising)

BTW, this is your last chance to enter the contest it ends tonight at 11:59pm EST.

-Justin Germino