How To Run A Giveaway With Rafflecopter

Following on from our latest giveaway where we use Rafflecopter to run the competition, I wanted to show you how to setup and run your own giveaway with Rafflecopter.

What Is Rafflecopter?

Rafflecopter is a really easy way to setup and run giveaways on your website.  It lets you create and place an entry form/box on your site that encourages people to perform tasks in order to enter the giveaway.  This can include;

• Following a Twitter account
• Liking a Facebook page
• Leaving a comment on a post
• Tweeting about the competition
• …and more!

The more tasks a person completes, the more entries into the competition they will get – so they increase their chance of winning.

Once you have created your Rafflecopter entry form you can embed it into any post or page you want on your site, even in multiple locations.  What’s even better is that you can add it to your Facebook page and run it from there as well!

Once your giveaway has finished, Rafflecopter makes it really easy to choose a winner.  Not only will it allow you to select your winners at random, you can verify your winners and announce the winners directly on the widget (which will automatically show up wherever you embedded the widget).

The best bit though is that it’s FREE to set up a basic account!

Make Sure You Have A Prize

Before I begin to go through the setup process, you obviously need something to giveaway as a prize.  This can be anything really, whether it’s one of your own products that you offer or you can team up with a company to offer a prize.

I did this with 1theme, where they got in touch with me to ask if I’d be willing to run a giveaway with some of their themes.  They get some free promotion on a site and I get a competition to run to help attract traffic.  You can always try contacting companies yourself to ask if they’d be interested in running a competition on your site.  More often than not, they will be happy to do so.

Setting Up Your Rafflecopter Giveaway

1. Create Account

Head over to Rafflecopter.com and create an account.  Once you have an account and are logged in, you can begin to create your giveaway.

2. Create ‘+NEW GIVEAWAY’

On the next screen you will be able to enter in all your giveaway details.

3. Name your Giveaway

This is just to help you identify your giveaway should you have more than one.  It won’t actually show up on the widget itself.

4. Add a Prize

You need to write out clearly what you are giving away as a prize.  You can even add an image, though you can only do that if you upgrade.

5. How To Enter

There are a number of options that you can setup to allow people to enter.   You can add as many (or as little) as you want.  Ideally, the more the better as it gives people added incentive to enter as then they have more chances to win.

I won’t go through all the options, as they are pretty self-explanatory, but let’s take a look at ‘Tweet about the Giveaway’ as an example.

Here you can enter in the text that will be tweeted out when someone clicks on the option (a link will be automatically included).  This can help spread the word about your competition and encourage more people to enter.

You can set a ‘Point Value’ (just as you can with all the options) that will give a weight to that entry.  So in this case, where we have given a +3 point value, every person that tweets about the giveaway will get 3 entries into the giveaway.  This is quite a smart system by Rafflecopter as you can encourage people to do different things.  If your aim was to get more Twitter subscribers then you could give a higher point value to that.

Finally you can select whether the option is open to be done once each day by entrants and whether it is mandatory.

6. Set Your Competition Dates

Simply set when your competition starts and when it ends.  This makes it perfectly clear to anyone visiting your site how long the competition runs for.  You want your competition to run for at least a week to give people chance to enter.

7. Terms & Conditions

Every competition needs terms and conditions.  This is basically the rules of your competition that entrants need to abide by.  Rafflecopter have a Terms and Conditions template that you can use if you upgrade.

Embed Your Giveaway Widget

Once you have finished setting up your giveaway, you can then embed it on your site and/or Facebook page.

Rafflecopter will give you a snippet of HTML code that you can add to any post/page on your site (remember to add it in the HTML section).  Simply copy & paste to wherever you want.

You can also add your widget to your Facebook page so that your fans can find it easily.

That’s all there is to it!

1. Log into Rafflecopter
2. Setup your Giveaway
3. Embed onto your website/Facebook page

Now all you need to do is promote it to your visitors.

Remember to enter our very own giveaway that we are running

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Have you used Rafflecopter yet?  Have you entered a competition that used Rafflecopter?  If so, what did you think to it?  Please let us know by leaving a comment below.