The secret weapon for all new blogs/sites : Rafflecopter

Jon

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So


The secret weapon is indeed
http://www.rafflecopter.com/


Rafflecopter lets you runs raffles on your website for FREE


What is the hardest part of setting up a new site/blog. Clearly it is getting an audience for all your work


I knew of Rafflecopter already from entering comps but it wasn't until I saw it in action if a BRAND NEW BLOG that I realised its potential


A site that had only just started had got a couple of hundred entrants for their amazon giveaway in just a few days and I wanted to understand how that was possible


1) Compers DO NOW CARE ABOUT YOUR BRAND : you need to accept this. They retweet without a thought and like without really caring you need to accept this


2) There will be a cost : You have to actually give something away from experience £20 is enough and if it is an Amazon voucher all the better as compers search for that


3) advertising : you want your raffle to help get your name/site out there so how do you do that


Say your contest just involves following your twitter account and retweeting a message about your site


Let's look at the current Money Shed £20 Amazon giveaway I am running on our facebook page


The message they have to RT is




#Win £20 in Amazon Vouchers with @TheMoneyShed this August -themoneyshed.co.uk #competition rafl-fb-tab-app.s3.amazonaws.com/21114635574384…


We use the #win that Compers search for. The word Amazon is also there. A link to TMS and then a link to the comp itself and the #competition as well


Users can also enter by liking the Facebook page and following @themoneyshed


Now the genius of all this is that people can enter as many times as they want (well once a day) throughout the competition by retweeting the message. other Compers pick up on this and all do the same so you have people out there who just keep spreading your new sites names/address with no effort from yourself all for £20 Amazon voucher


We have picked up over 130 new Facebook likes since I started this on Friday, another 100 twitter followers, new members etc


well worth doing if you want to get your new sites name out there
 

onebusywahm

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I have a love-hate relationship with Rafflecopter, having seen the impact it has had for many other bloggers.

Ultimately, it comes down to the goals of the blogger and what they want to achieve.

For example, an increase of 130 new Facebook Likes 'feels' great, but *if* those Likes come from compers and people just after a free win, there is a very high chance they will later unlike or hide your page once the competition has ended. Not all will, but a high chance for many.

I know of bloggers that have built their Pages to 10's of thousands, yet for anyone looking on their Page at a regular post, you will see the community engagement (post likes, comments) is VERY low. That's because their Page has been hidden by many and posts are not seen / the person has no interest in that Page after the comp has ended. Facebook algorithms are largely driven by engagement so a Page with poor engagement will result in lower visibility in news feeds.

Another option that works well for giveaways is to make subscription to your RSS feed / email newsletter mandatory - you then have the option to send a 'Welcome to TMS' email and schmooze the email list :) . Similarly, making a blog comment mandatory, such as "Tell me in the comments what you favourite money saving tips is.... " And then picking one commenter at random. Comments are indexed by Google and having a large number of comments centred around a prime blog keyword will help your ranking also.
 

Jon

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Interesting

I have tried the "you just comment to enter" (I think I said 5-10 posts) before and the quality of the posts were total crap which is obviously awful for a forum such as this

A VERY experienced comper said to be when she was helping me word the raffle copter contests explained to me that compers just want "simple" and kind of like you mentioned don't care about the brand/blog/site at all

If there is some kind of better advertising I can spend £20 on for this site then I am all ears
 
P

Pheebs

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My Rafflecopter campaign is going well so far.

Lots of interaction and interest. Obviously the prize is a big factor in a lot of these people looking at the site, but their retweets and posts are potentially exposing my site to thousands upon thousands of people daily. Not bad for a £20 outlay.

35 days to go!
 

toastking

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Pheebs said:
My Rafflecopter campaign is going well so far.

Lots of interaction and interest. Obviously the prize is a big factor in a lot of these people looking at the site, but their retweets and posts are potentially exposing my site to thousands upon thousands of people daily. Not bad for a £20 outlay.

35 days to go!

What kind of results have you managed to achieve? Do your new users actively engage with you and your content or are they just growing in numbers?
 
P

Pheebs

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toastking said:
Pheebs said:
My Rafflecopter campaign is going well so far.

Lots of interaction and interest. Obviously the prize is a big factor in a lot of these people looking at the site, but their retweets and posts are potentially exposing my site to thousands upon thousands of people daily. Not bad for a £20 outlay.

35 days to go!

What kind of results have you managed to achieve? Do your new users actively engage with you and your content or are they just growing in numbers?

I've had pretty good results. There are definitely people that just make up the numbers, but there are also a lot of people that engage with me quite frequently. Blog comments have risen dramatically, and so have social media interactions. All in all, it was worth it for £20, and I feel like I've got my foot in the door now.
 

Jon

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I think if you can afford it there is absolutely no harm in spending £20 a month on contests

Will at the very least keep people coming back for more
 
P

Pheebs

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Jon@TheMoneyShed said:
I think if you can afford it there is absolutely no harm in spending £20 a month on contests

Will at the very least keep people coming back for more

Definitely. Plus, once you've actually got a decent loyal audience, the prize is worth even more to get them interacting with you.

The one downside to Rafflecopter is that the width of the entry box can't be changed. It's made my website look awful on mobile phones for a month, so I won't miss that, that's for sure!
 

Jon

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toastking said:
Pheebs said:
My Rafflecopter campaign is going well so far.

Lots of interaction and interest. Obviously the prize is a big factor in a lot of these people looking at the site, but their retweets and posts are potentially exposing my site to thousands upon thousands of people daily. Not bad for a £20 outlay.

35 days to go!

What kind of results have you managed to achieve? Do your new users actively engage with you and your content or are they just growing in numbers?

I think this is a good point, what is the 'payoff' for your £20 Amazon prize

Let's say you are just starting out on social media

You have a Twitter and Facebook account and they literally have a handful of followers/likes

That impression isn't great.

For £20 you can 'boost' that impression (OK, some of it may be artificial) and gain many hundreds of followers, many of which won;'t engage with you again.

Going forward though you are going to look much for appealing to follow when people look at your pages.

In that way, I think it is money very well spent
 

Jon

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Boom Boom said:
How do you pick the winner using rafflecopter?


Rafflecopter randomly choose one for you after you click the 'choose a winner' button
 
A

alicat

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if your blog is designed to do a lot of affiliate marketing for you this could be an awesome way of generating backlinks, support, sales etc but they scare me a little for specialist interest type things where you want genuine readers but if it brings just one genuine supporter of your content and builds a tonne of background stuff to boost you on google to then be visible to more genuine supporters it has to be a good thing.
 

Blackpepper1

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I am going to give this a go after Christmas.
Looks worthwhile.
 
P

Pheebs

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Blackpepper1 said:
I am going to give this a go after Christmas.
Looks worthwhile.

I've actually backtracked a little bit on my stance now. I'm starting to feel that it wasn't really worth it.

Yes, it gave me a few followers and "likes", and as I was just starting it made my accounts looks better. In reality, however, I've not had one single interaction from those who were joining in with the competition since it ended.
 

toastking

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Pheebs said:
Blackpepper1 said:
I am going to give this a go after Christmas.
Looks worthwhile.

I've actually backtracked a little bit on my stance now. I'm starting to feel that it wasn't really worth it.

Yes, it gave me a few followers and "likes", and as I was just starting it made my accounts looks better. In reality, however, I've not had one single interaction from those who were joining in with the competition since it ended.

Yeah that is the general feedback I see, that it adds numbers but nobody that is actually interested, you are just as well off using a social exchange scheme online (and we all know those aren't great)
 

Jon

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I still think giving the 'impression' of having a high number of followers does help you and will draw more people in.


It's a chicken and an egg situation really, you struggle enough setting up any kind of website in terms of creating content, you really want to make the social media side of things as easy as you can do if possible
 

Boom Boom

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What is Gleam? I keep seeing that kicking around and it looks a bit like Rafflecopter.
 

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