Running a give away is a great way to raise brand awareness, increase social following, social engagements, blog comments and so on. The give away can have many objectives and offer various prizes as incentives for the participants to interact with your content.
When the objective is to increase your brand awareness I have found the Amazon Gift Card works best, as opposed to doing a specific product or niche gift card. Using the Amazon Gift Card will have a broader appeal AND result in more people engaging with my content and helping improve it’s ranking score.
For example, below is a screen shot of a give away used to promote our gardening channel, Experiential Gardener.
Entrants in this give away will receive an entry for ReTweeting selected tweets. That will boost those tweets. They will visit some Instagram posts and tag a few friends. They will visit Facebook posts and many will leave likes and comments.
You get the idea?
But what about that first item, “Check out Todays Specials on Amazon“?
The entrant will earn one entry in the contest for clicking this link and in 24 hours they can come back and earn another entry. In the give away world, this is known as a daily entry and give away participants love daily entries.
Entrants will come back daily and Check out Todays Specials on Amazon to earn that entry into the contest AND keeping my Amazon Affiliate cookie fresh on their system so that when they buy something on Amazon I will get the credit.
You might be thinking “yeah, if they buy something on Amazon”. I thought the same way, in fact, I only put up the Check out Todays Specials on Amazon so people would come back daily to the contest page and look at other ads. What I didn’t realize was the obvious:
Anyone Interested in winning an Amazon Giftcard is very likely an avid Amazon Shopper.
A few weeks after I first implemented the Check out Todays Specials on Amazon I logged into my Amazon just to check the traffic and was shocked to find over 3K in sales had been generated!
So this $50 Amazon Gift Card Give Away generated traffic that resulted in $111.61 in commissions. That wasn’t even the intention of the give away. The give away successfully brought in over 1,400 entrants that generated more than 7,000 page views and but loads of engagement on our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts.
I also wanted to point out that in the 30 day sample above that my marketing list had 831 subscribers at the beginning of Feb. On Feb 28th I announced Experiential Gardeners “Spring Is Coming” give away and my list had grown to 1,666. This give away went viral and as a result my subscriber base climbed to 2,419 by Mar 5th and as of this writing, Mar 8th, is 2,532.
With over 600 people a day visiting the give away page I have seen $60 in earnings for the first 6 days of March, a rate that will put me around $250 for the month with no further growth to the list. The $50 spend on the gift card bought me a lot of social activity and visibility, and put money back in my pocket.
This strategy is ideal for anyone needing to grow their following and increase brand awareness on social media. Schedule a call to learn more.
Update 3/25
The Viral Give Away is still pulling traffic as it continues to it’s final day of April 4th. The people visiting the giveaway are still clicking the button to Check out Todays Specials on Amazon , and they are still making purchases on Amazon.
Again, the purpose of this give away was to increase social engagement on Experiential Gardeners Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and blog posts. That it has done successfully. I was 100% content with the idea of spending $50 on a gift card to fund that promotion. However, because the contestants are getting cookied with my affiliate ID, I am going to have the giftcard paid for AND profit $150.
Bottom line is give aways are a great way to generate traffic from consumers that are actually spending money online.
