Here are some tips to help you enter Blog Giveaways and win.
1. Sign up for a free blog account. You can use an email address you already have to register for account. You do not have to sign up for a email account. You can get a free email account at Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, or Live.com.
2. Set up your own Blog. You don't have to be a blogger to have a blog. It is free to anyone. Sometimes a blogger will give you extra entries if you write a blog post about their giveaway on your blog and link to their contest page. Setting up a blog can take as little as 10 minutes if you use blogger.com and you don't need to know HTML or anything "techie" to do it.
3. If a blog does not require a Google or Blog account to enter you can usually enter using the Anonymous option. If you do this you MUST put at least your first name and your email address in your Comment box or they will not be able to contact you if you win.
4. If you stumble across a blog giveaway and it has just started DON'T ENTER. That's right - wait until the giveaway has a good amount of entries before you enter.
The reason: Many blog hosts will use Random.org to pick their winner. They count the total amount of entries. Then they go to http://www.random.org/ and use one of their calculators to come up with a random number based on the final total. They count through the list of entries until they get to the person whose numbers matches with the number picked by Random.org. That person is then declared the winner.
The problem? Random.org almost never picks a lower number. I have been running giveaways on a weekly basis and have used Random.org and most of the time (but not always) it picks numbers above 50. So, if you entered when the giveaway just got started your odds could be much lower than if you wait.
5. If a blog giveaway gives you 3 or 4 ways of entering such as posting a comment, subscribing to their feed, blogging about their contest, etc. do one and then wait until there are some other entries before you do the second one. This is similar to the way you enter mail-in sweepstakes. You are spacing out your entries in hopes that maybe one of your entries will be picked.
6. Most important - Read the Rules! I have seen over and over how many people who do not read what the blog host wants them to do and get disqualified.
Example: The blog host says, visit website http://whatever.com, find your favorite item they sell and then come back to this post and tell me what it is.
And the person writes: I want to win. DISQUALIFIED!
Please, please, please - read the rules or you are just wasting your time entering. This is a problem whether the sweepstakes are online or by mail. People don't read and they don't follow rules. You already have an advantage if you read the rules.
Let me know if you have questions, comments, or need help figuring out how to setup an email account or blog. I'm glad to help. You can find me on Twitter most days at www.twitter.com/TheComputerLady
2 comments:
I agree with most of these I tend to win a lot, I want to space out my extra entries but I forget to do it, so I do them all at once so I atleast get that chance. Also part of winning is the volume of entries you do, I enter into lots of giveaway but it always something I actually want for my family or my friends.
GREAT post!!! Very strategic and yes people.....PLEASE read the rules!
:)
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