Give it Away, Give it Away, Give it Away Now!
Sometimes you have to give a little to gain a lot. Consider creating a blog post that says “I’m giving away a free _____.” Post a comment below telling me what you would do with the free product, and I’ll pick a winner at random at the end of the month.” Email the winner an electronic coupon for the free product redeemable in your ecommerce store. Your results should improve as you gain a larger blog following, but here’s what to expect:
1. Free giveaways attract visitors – people will email a link to your giveaway to friends they think would be interested in the product. These visitors may become customers or follow your blog even if they don’t win the free product.
2. Giveaways attract incoming links – people will link from their blogs to yours, which helps boost your Pagerank, and thus, future traffic.
3. The winner will go through the normal checkout process in your store when they redeem their e-coupon. Often, they will purchase other products at the same time, and they may become a repeat customer or refer friends to your store.
4. The comments visitors post on your blog to enter the contest will likely be relevant copy that search engines will pick up. This can help your pages rank well for more keywords.
5. If you do this regularly, you will get a regular following on your blog and all of your posts will reach a larger audience. Try running a giveaway each month.
6. You will feel good – giving things away just feels nice.
Note: it’s important to have a prominent no-spam policy on your promotion pages. Of course, you will need to collect email addresses so that you can contact the winner. Make sure people know that this is all you will use the email addresses for, and do not be tempted to spam them.
And if you don’t have a blog or yours doesn’t get any traffic, give away your products on someone else’s blog. For ideas, check out some of the previous giveaways on Pregnant Chicken here: http://www.pregnantchicken.com/previous-contests/.
After receiving a degree in Industrial Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Alex began his career as a technology consultant with Accenture. In 1999 he left Accenture and founded Nexternal – a cloud-based eCommerce Platform company. Alex is passionate about eCommerce and online marketing. He is now a Senior Vice President of HighJump, managing the Nexternal business unit.
