Giveaways come in all shapes and sizes. They come as the form of Mac Book Pros and Amazon Gift Cards. While there are a fair share of great giveaways and giveaways that go wrong, everyone who hosts a giveaway wants to win. They want more engagement and long-term sales for their products. Luckily, there is a way to win as the host of a giveaway.
Allow everyone to win by doing something for you.
That’s all it takes. Mike Michalowicz, the master of hosting giveaways, did this for his book The Pumpkin Plan. For the book’s launch, anyone who submitted a video revealing their inner critic and posted it on YouTube got the book for free. Two runners-up would get a free 1 hour consultation session while 1 grand winner would get to have dinner with Mike and his inner circle of helpers. There were some requirements for this giveaway, but the big one was that at the very end of the video, everyone had to put visible and legible text “The Pumpkin Plan July 5, 2012” and have it displayed for at least three seconds.
It is easy to imagine that this marketing stunt cost a lot of money. It is easy to imagine that 100 people submitted videos for The Pumpkin Plan. If anyone who got his book for free left a review, those reviews probably were 4-5 star reviews each. That makes a book look a lot better on Amazon, and it also lowers the sales rank of a book (which means Amazon does a better job at promoting it and more people get to see the book). Even more, Mike’s method of choosing a winner had a 4 part process in which 75% of the process involved how many times the video got shared and viewed on social networks. This allowed Mike to create a sales army, and even though he had to pay for the sales army (buying and sending over books costs money), those videos are still up on YouTube which means his book The Pumpkin Plan is still being promoted by an array of people.
The next time you host your own giveaway, ask yourself how you can make sure that everyone wins a free prize.
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