Blog Competitions & Giveaways
I have to admit that I quite enjoy a freebie. Who doesn’t? As much as I LOVE winning competitions and giveaways, I also love GIVING them. I figure it’s a win-win situation all round. 
Bloggers use blog competitions for all kinds of reasons. They create an atmosphere of fun within a blog community. They can be a way for a blog writer to in some small way “give back” or say “thankyou” to their regular readers and commentors.
They can also be used as a way of promoting your blog. To encourage people to visit, comment, link to and/or subscribe to your blog.
Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote a couple of articles on this recently
The Costs and Benefits of Running a Competition on Your Blog
How to Run a Successful Competition on Your Blog
One of the things I LOVE about blog competitions is the higher chances of winning. Even the larger blogs have a lot less entries to their giveaways and competitions than through most non-blogging competitions (on or off line).
I can’t say that I enter that many blog competitions but here are a few competitions I have won in recent months:
Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast courtesy of All For Women’s 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway
500 Entrecard credits thanks to Socko’s Spot
Super Food Ideas Summer Favourites recipe book from Lizzie’s Home
It’s the type of thing I would usually blog about. “Hey look what I won and thanks very much”. But well, it’s been a busy period of time in the last couple of months. So I hope the people who generously gave said gifts/prizes will accept this as a belated thank you. 
It would seem that some people are not so keen on blog competitions. Perhaps they see them as blogs buying readers. I’m not sure. For me, it is more about the FUN and less about the promotion. But at the same time, if you can make use of it to build the profile of your blog or encourage comments or backlinks, why not?
My only concern with some blog competitions is the requirement to jump through hoops in order to win them. Write a post, provide a link, leave a comment….. whatever. I don’t have a problem with ANY of those things when a blogger wishes to run a competition. It’s when a blogger asks for ALL of those things (or a combination of) that I tend to go “too hard….not worth my effort”.
Here are my “tips” I’ve learnt in my time blogging when it comes to running a competition
Make it fun
If you run a personal blog, you want it to be a fun place for people to come, at least some of the time. A blog competition is a great way to promote a fun atmosphere on your blog.
Keep it Simple
Keep entry requirements down to 1 or 2 actions. If you want to encourage people to do more than 1 action, consider offering additional entries for those actions. Of course, if it’s a rather large prize you are offering, you can get away with expecting more from entrants.
Consider a Way to Make it International
Blogging is an INTERNATIONAL media. Consider running at least *some* of your competitions in such a way that overseas visitors can enter. It’s quite disheartening to be a reader of a blog that only runs competitions for those in the US. It can backfire and make those international visitors feel unvalued. I can understand this isn’t always possible due to postage costs but at least put some thought into it.
Over to You
So, what do you think about blog competitions? Do you enjoy them? Do you enter?
Have you run or considered running a competition on your blog? Why or why not?
Do you have any good or bad experiences to share when it comes to competitions you’ve run or entered?
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Comments
I’ve run competitions on fairly large (non-blog) sites for international audiences and have found that the old Amazon.com voucher is one of the easiest to do prizes around. You don’t have to worry about posting anything out to anyone (and worldwide postage can get a bit expensive if you are sending something to someone in an out of the way place like one of the central asian republics).
One thing I’ve found though over the decade that I’ve been involved with such things is that competitions are rarely all that great at driving traffic to a site (unless you are giving away a car or something). Mostly it just helps to keep a community entertained.
The US limit on comps (I work for US companies) is generally because of all the mucking about that needs to be done to send all but the most basic items off shore (customs declarations and so on).
Ben - thanks for your thoughts and experience with this issue. I’m glad your comp worked out well. I agree that doing something different is a good idea. Entrecard credits are becoming a great way to offer competitions on blogs that are easy to transfer to anyone online. Interesting to note they now have a monetary value as people are buying and selling them.
StillKindaStuffy - thanks for weighing in on the topic. I hadn’t considered the customs angle although I haven’t had too much trouble sending my prizes overseas. I just try to stick to stuff that isn’t too heavy. I think online vouchers are a great way to go. As for generating traffic or not. My last blog comp on Lightening Online generated quite a bit of traffic. I’m not so sure how much of it was quality traffic though. My subscriber count did go up during that time so I think I possibly picked up a couple of regular readers. The hardest thing I find is working out how much difference a comp has made. Then again, most of mine are more about fun and rewarding readers so I guess it doesn’t matter all that much (at this stage).
I only enter a few competitions .It annoys me about US ones. I agree that ‘jumping through hoops’ leaves me less excited but it is nice to be entertained (like Captions comps) and to win even a small prize for the fun of it. Though offer me money prizes and i will be in like a flash of lightening.
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Hi Lightening, I agree with your points. I don’t usually enter competitions because the entry requirements are just too complicated. I am so glad to read the comment about not limiting it to people in the US, this has been a major annoyance for me in the past!
In December, I ran a competition where I gave away 100 Entrecard credits. It was only a small prize and I ran it before too many other blogs were doing a similar thing. But a lot of the other competitions required to subscribe or link back to the blog. I just asked people to leave a comment and they’d be in the draw. I also recorded a video to pick the winner in a really unusual way. So, I did my best to make it stand out, and it did pretty well all things considered.