One of the easiest ways to drive traffic and build a readership is to use giveaways.
The same is true for building an email list.
If you’re already a regular here at SidelinePlay, you’ll know about the various giveaways I host to help my community get started on their blogging journey. Most of our giveaways are related to hosting, domain names, WordPress themes, online courses, and a few other things that are designed to make it easier for anyone to start and grow their online business.
Let's talk about a tool called Gleam that can make hosting your first contest a lot easier.
Before using Gleam to run giveaways on my blog, I also used Kingsumo , which is another great tool for running giveaways on WordPress sites. The only downside to Kingsumo is that it’s expensive. For someone who doesn’t have a giveaway strategy, it’s not worth the money.
Gleam, on the other hand, is a great tool for running your first giveaway because it offers a free plan and you can upgrade based on the features you want. I use their “Pro” plan, which is only $39 per month.
You can also use Gleam to:
- Host a giveaway on your YouTube channel
- Run a contest on your Facebook page
- As an Instagram contest and competition app
- As a Twitter contest application
It’s good enough for the occasional giveaway. You can always upgrade to get more features, or downgrade to save money. More on that later…
Now, let’s learn how to use this nifty tool to run and host your first giveaway.
Why is Gleam a great tool for giving away gifts?
Most marketers use giveaways as a list building tool.
This is a great strategy, but the ROI is usually not great because these lists often contain people who have no interest in your niche/product and are only in it for the freebie. This is why I recommend that you use these contests to primarily grow your social media following.
If you’re looking for sponsors for your contest, you can also use the contest as an incentive to get those sponsors more exposure on social media.
In addition to building an email list, Gleam also gives you the option to increase your social media following and/or engagement. It supports all major social networking platforms including Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook (to name a few).
Gleam isn’t just a tool for bloggers, it’s also ideal for entrepreneurs and internet marketers, whether launching a product or promoting a SaaS product. Best of all, they offer a ton of sample contests so you can get an idea of what’s possible with your first (or next) giveaway.
In fact, it's the first thing you see when you enter the Gleam dashboard.
See this example screenshot:
In the screenshot below, you can see an example of a contest created for app downloads:
The possibilities are endless with what Gleam offers.
Now that you and I are on the same page, let’s get started by creating a sample contest.
How to host a giveaway to attract potential customers or grow your business?
(This is a real contest I created for ShoutMeLoud readers.)
Once you’re in your dashboard, you can start creating your giveaway in two ways.
- You can copy giveaway ideas from the example contests.
- You can create a new contest from scratch.
- For this tutorial, I will be creating a competition from scratch.
Set up a giveaway
Setting up a giveaway only takes a few steps.
The first thing you need to do is give your giveaway a name and set a start and end time.
Keep an eye out for the "Location and Language" box. With this option, you can limit the giveaway to specific geographic locations. I'm sure this will be useful for many of us in certain situations.
Once you have completed all the fields here, click on the "4. Prizes" tab to enter your prize information:
How to enter
This is where things get interesting because you can set rules/conditions for users to participate in your giveaway. This part depends entirely on your goals and what you want to achieve with your contest.
You can make any input method mandatory or optional.
I usually force users to subscribe to my emails and share virally. If you also want to build an email list, you can choose the "Subscribe to Newsletter" option.
Currently, Gleam supports the following email marketing services:
I use AWeber and Kit to manage my email lists.
User Details
In my case, I made email subscription mandatory so that users don’t have to log in before taking action.
However, if you are not planning on creating an email list, you may want your users to log in. To do this, you can click on the "2. User Details" tab and configure the settings. Again, this is pretty straightforward, so you shouldn't run into any configuration issues.
Click Save and you're done. Your contest is created!
How to add a contest to your blog or Facebook page
Now, the next step is to add the contest to your blog or Facebook page (or simply let Gleam host your giveaway page).
If you also want to embed the contest into your blog post (like ShoutMeLoud did), click on the “6. Installation Options” tab and copy/paste the code into the blog post where you want the giveaway widget to appear.
newFrame.style.position = 'relative';
newFrame.style.left = '';
newFrame.setAttribute('data-loaded-widget', 'true');
}
}" data-loaded-widget="true">
Picking winners and handling erroneous submissions
After the contest is over, you can select the winners directly from the Gleam dashboard. They also handle fake entries.
The winners' names can also be displayed on the widget. This saves a lot of time. Once you have everything set up, the next contest can be hosted by one of your team members.
Gleam Review Pricing and Conclusion
I've used various giveaway tools in the past, but Gleam is by far the best.
It offers all the features you need to run a successful giveaway. The basic plan starts *at $0* , making it perfect for those on a budget.
For users like me or you, the "Pro" or "Business" plans are the best fit.
As I said before, you can always downgrade your plan to Free or upgrade to Pro/Business. This way, you are not locked into these plans forever and you only pay for the months when you need to run a contest/giveaway on your blog or Facebook page.
Overall, I am very satisfied after using Gleam and give it a 5/5 star rating because it is powerful and the price is right.
If you’ve never hosted a giveaway before, now is the perfect time for you to start.
Tell me: What do you think of this review and what kind of giveaways do you plan to run with Gleam?
Please share this guide with others as it might help them grow their blog with the help of the giveaway!
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