Blogging is very popular and blog giveaways are an ever-growing category for Sweepers to enter. The blogger might be promoting a product for a big brand or maybe they just want to introduce you to their blog by hosting a giveaway of their own. Whatever the case, you can win some great prizes through blog giveaways.
Here are some secrets for Entering and Winning Blog Giveaways
Sign up for a free email address
Make sure you have a separate email address when you are entering either blog giveaways, sweepstakes or instant win games. If you already set one up to enter sweepstakes you can use that email address. There is no need to set up a separate one just for blog giveaways. You will get extra email – no junk or spam mail – if you are entering legitimate sweepstakes like confirmations, newsletters, and winning notifications and you don’t want to clog up your regular Inbox with these extra emails.
Here are some free email providers you can use:
- Gmail: www.gmail.com
- Hotmail: www.hotmail.com
- Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
- AOL: www.aol.com
Include your email address in your entry
Many times someone will enter a blog giveaway and never leave their email address. I have had winners from my blog giveaways do this and lose their prize. No email address, no way of contacting you.
Check your email!
I have had countless people who have entered my own blog giveaways lose out on great prizes because they never responded to my email announcing that they were the winner. The email address is the only way a blog owner has to contact you. Some bloggers will give you 48 to 72 hours and then they will pick another winner.
Always check your Junk or Spam mail folder every few days to make sure nothing has gotten lost there.
Spell Check Your Entry
Not only check your email but TYPE YOUR EMAIL CORRECTLY when you enter the blog giveaway. This is ultra important. More than spelling your name correctly, your email address MUST be correct or the blog owner has NO WAY or contacting you. I have also tried to email winners and had their email bounce because they typed your email address incorrectly. Always double-check your entry whether you are entering a blog giveaways or regular sweepstakes to make sure everything is correct before you enter.
Sign up for a free Blog (Optional)
You don’t have to be a blogger to have a blog. It is free to anyone. It is another way of entering Blog giveaways. I think you should use Blogger.com because it is quick and easy. You can setup a Blogger blog in 5 minutes without any technical knowledge.
Why do you want to have a blog to enter blog giveaways? Some blog giveaways will give you extra entries if you post about their giveaway and link to them in your own blog. It only takes a couple of minutes to do this and it might help you win.
Did the Blog Giveaway just start? 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 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 often picks a higher number. I run blog giveaways from time to time and use Random.org and I find that it rarely picks numbers 1-10. However, sometimes it does but most of the time I found that the numbers were much higher. I have never seen it pick #1. So, if you entered when the giveaway just got started your odds are much lower.
If a blog giveaways gives you 3 or 4 ways of entering, WAIT!
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.
Everytime you do one of these methods below (except for maybe Twitter or Facebook) you usually have to post another comment on the blog that is hosting the giveaway to let them know you have done that extra task.
These other ways of entering include:
- posting a comment
- subscribing to their blog’s feed
- blogging about their giveaways
- following them on Twitter
- sending out a tweet about the giveaway on Twitter
- send to a friend on Facebook
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.
Example: The blog host says, visit website www.example.com, find your favorite item they sell and then come back to this post and tell me what it is.
The person writes: I want to win.
Do you think they will win? Absolutely not because they didn’t follow the rules or even bother to even read the rules. They are 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 mail-in. People don’t read and they don’t follow rules. You already have an advantage if you read the rules.
I don’t understand… if random.org is truly a random number generator, the number 1 would have just as likely of a chance as any other number to get selected. Also, spacing out comments shouldn’t have any effect. If I do comments 15-20, or comments 10,18,37,49,61 – it’s all the same probability.
Yes #1 does have a chance. I am just going by my own experience of hosting and running blog giveaways. I have never seen #1 picked in all of the times I have run a giveaway. I don’t know why. I just know it doesn’t seem to pick the lower numbers. I have seen it pick numbers 8 and 9 before though. I also think that spacing your entries out might give you an edge because I have never seen it pick numbers together – example: 234, 235 – but then again, I am no Mathematician and this is just from my experience running my own blog giveaways over the last 2 years.
I few months ago, I would have agreed. But in the past couple of months it picks one a lot. I think they fixed it. Because I always use to think that random.org is not really random. I was testing Random.org on a blog that happened to have it embedded. I used the numbers 1-5. It picked 1 like 5 times but would never pic 5.
I actually won 2 giveaways recently. One I was #1 commenter & one I was #3 commenter. She said she used random.org to choose winners. There are so many to enter everywhere I wish I could get some goodies to have more giveaways on my food blog! I think it’s way too hard to go back & do extra entries later with so many going on at once. I just take my chances while I’m there and I’m done with it. It’s working out pretty well for me since I just started doing this a month ago.
Thanks Wendy for encouraging entrants to read the rules!
If you already subscribe to a blogger’s newsletter or whatever, can you still leave a comment/use that as an entry (provided it is an additional way to get an entry) even though you are not newly subscribing?
If random.org is random as it claims, then you just think they never pick the number 1 because 1 is such a memorable number. You probably don’t remember whether it ever picked number 48 or 92. Numbers like 1, 100, etc you do remember seeing. Out of 100 entries, 1 should have just as likely a chance of winning as 53 does, but you won’t remember number 53 in a week, just that it was a “higher” number, which a range of 30-80 is more likely than a range of 1-10 just because there are more numbers in that range.
The winning lottery number is just as likely to include 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6…but everyone will say those “never” win…well, they are as likely as your birthday and address, or whatever random lucky ones you pick!
Thank you SO much for the tips!!!!
I agree with you sweetie! Thanks for the tips, I’m loving your site!
do you mean that when I enter blog giveaways I have to enter my email in the body of the comment in addition to the form where they have already asked me to enter.
I agree that lower numbers don’t seem to be picked AS often, but I have seen lower numbers picked as winners many times.
I enter a lot of blog giveaways, and what you say about spacing out your entries makes very good logical sense. However, since I enter so many of them, it is too much work to keep going back to different giveaways and putting in another entry.
I use a Word document with columns and rows, and have the link to the giveaway, the text to tweet, and end date. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of which ones end when and what to tweet where. But going back multiple times for entries proved to just slow me down. I found that I was still winning a lot even without spacing the entries out.
Your site has lots of great tips and info, keep it up! 🙂
Thanks for sharing these tips. As you mentioned winning required certain tips to win, and yes if we follow these tips we can win lot of prizes from sweepstakes. Once again thanks for sharing such use full information.