Saturday, September 12, 2009

Giveaway Advice Needed!

Yup, I'm looking for giveaway advice. I think I've mustered up the courage to do my very first jewelry giveaway. I don't know what piece/ pieces, or how to even get started with something like this. If anyone has any advice, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I was thinking of something that could combine twitter, facebook, blogs and my Etsy site...is that just too ridiculous? Or would it be manageable since they're linked? I want to reach as many people as possible...

So this is what I'd need to know:
Where do you post info?
How long is a reasonable amount of time to let people enter my contest?
What should I have them do to enter? Maybe post a link to their blog/ FB or Twitter Accounts in an attempt to help advertise my work?
How do I keep track of who did what?
And most importantly, how do I decide who wins? Pick a name out of a hat?

If you have experience, or ideas, please let me know, and then keep posted so you can enter my FIRST GIVEAWAY! YEEE!

3 comments:

Diane said...

I subscribe to a lot of blogs regarding fabric, quilting, knitting jewelry making and paper crafts. Many are blogs by designers for a major fabric line...MODA....so they very often give away fabric. Sometimes the quilt blogs have contests or block swaps and there is a prize..........very often they use a gadget called random.org (I think that's the name).....which randomly picks someone from the comments.
Sometimes the author of the blog poses a question and then lets someone objective like their husband chose the comment they like the best. The winner notified with an announcement on your blog by first name or the name on the comment post- to then email you their name and address address so you can send the prize. Have fun-I will definitely enter!!!

Margaux Lange said...

I've done an annual giveaway for the past two years - always around the holidays (the best buying season of course) - when you want to be most visible to potential buyers. I announced and "advertised" the contest on my blog, FB and twitter. My contests involve a guessing element because I think people always have fun with that. It's easy and it grabs their attention. Classic "how many jelly beans in the jar" style, involving Barbie bodies/parts in a bucket :-) The person who came the closest to guessing the correct number won the jewelry item. The length of time the contests ran was a week both times I did it, and that seemed to be sufficient for me. I wouldn't go any longer than two weeks.

I made the mistake last time of having the option for people to enter their guesses on my FB page AND on my blog and boy, I'll never do that again! People were guessing the same numbers as a result and it was a mess. I recommend centralizing it to ONE location only or else it's hard to keep track of. Advertising it all over your various networking sites of course but directing them to one site only to enter, whether it be your blog, FB, twitter or whatever.

I was solicited for a giveaway contest recently through a fellow blog author that often does giveaways in collaboration with artists. I agreed to do it, (after some hesitation, b/c I only like to do giveaways once a year) because they are well established and I respect their blog and design aesthetics. Anyway, the way that blog ran the contest, you had to re-tweet about it on twitter to enter. I don't know how they ended up choosing someone based on the RT's (the contest was run entirely by them - all I did was advertise about it) but it was interesting in that it was very easy to enter and also, like you said, was a sort of viral advertising of my work via twitter - which seems to be the attention span du jour right now!

So that's my two cents… (er, twenty) haha Hope it helps! :-)

Katie Do said...

Thank you both so much! I'll be using your advise!