Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Rafflecopter for Giveaways - #Wwow



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Today's Writer's Words of Wisdom is about Giveaways. Since I've been doing one giveaway a month, I thought I'd share the easiest way to handle them. 

RAFFLECOPTER!

If you are participating in a blog hop, or just having a regular giveaway, you must check out this website. It does everything for you! Go to www.rafflectopter.com. The home page looks like this:

Next, you SIGN UP for free with the GET STARTED button. There are other plans where you can pay, but those are not necessarily needed for simple giveaways. You may want to think about it if you plan on lots of giveaways.

Once you are logged in. It will take you to your dashboard. See mine below.


Next, you will need to PLAN ONE NOW. It is simple. 


Name your giveaway. For example, my last giveaway was BLACK FRIDAY HOP.

Decide on your prize. You can give anything. I find that Gift Certificates are favorites. Other authors give away their own books or other's books.

How do people enter? You can decide. Have them leave a blog comment, tweet about the giveaway, follow your blog, follow you on twitter or facebook. It's up to you!

Add in your start and end dates. Check carefully the time periods. 

Click GET THE WIDGET. You will now see what your widget looks like. Copy and Paste the HTML code and insert into your blog post. Simple!

Once your giveaway ends, you sign back in to Rafflecopter, click on the title of the giveaway and select a winner. Rafflecopter does it for you! Easy! I usually download the excel sheet to make sure that the winner has done what they said. It's only fair. 

Then you contact the winner. Ta-Da! Everyone is happy. 

Try it out. You won't be sorry!
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WoW is a Smart & Savvy Group of Authors who write this weekly feature for their blog each Wednesday. While we don't claim to be experts, the goal is to impart what we've learned about writing, editing, getting published, book promotion, and more along the way. 
Follow along and read all this week's contributors' posts. 


You can follow us on twitter at #WWoW.
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Thanks for stopping by,

Melinda


4 comments:

  1. I recently started using Rafflecopter and I love it! It's so easy to set up different ways for people to get entries in your giveaways. I even have them tweet about the blog, become followers of the blog or on Facebook/Twitter. The ideas are endless. One thing I did find was that I can't get the Rafflecopter widget to open up on Wordpress. It takes you to a different page whereas Blogger will post the Rafflecopter graphic right in the post for you.

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  2. That's good to know about WordPress. I wonder why?

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  3. I just started to use refflecopter and I liked it for the two giveaways I used it with.

    Great post!

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  4. I love Rafflecopter. I posted about it awhile ago but your step-by-step guide was more comprehensive for new users. Rafflecopter makes contests so much easier - I don't know why anyone wouldn't use it!

    FYI: There's a different code to cut and past for Wordpress. I found it along the bottom, below the other links.

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