Fire Up Your Giveaway!

In honor of the next couple of months and the fabulous blogs we will be featuring, I want to share some of the ways I discovered to promote your giveaway and your blog.

Unless your a blogger who gets thousands of hits a day with tons and tons of people referring to your blog and promoting your events at their own blog, sometimes it can be discouraging to have a giveaway.  You often have to work to get people to even enter!  I remember some of my first few dissapointing giveaways on other blogs.  I would wait and wait, checking my comments wondering why they were so few and far between...

I have since learned that everything evolves around work in the blogging world.  If you leave your future to chance or luck,  its more likely than not you will flop and fail.  The internet is so vast that for someone to stumble upon anything that isn't ranked 1st in a Google Search list is like 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 - (don't quote my possibly exaggerated numbers - its more like an example to make a point :-)  Sometimes you wonder, how many sites can there be out there?  Beyond our comprehensive imagination I believe.  Just in your native language alone, how many cooking sites are there?  Lots.  Lots and lots and lots.

So when your small and want exposure through a giveaway, don't despair.  There are ways to help yourself!

1. Link up to all the giveaway parties you can.

Moms By Heart has a huge list of parties here for everyday of the week to join.  Parties do some of the work advertising your giveaway for you.

Link up Moneysavingmom.com giveaway list, Tipjunkie.com listing and any safe listing you can find.

2. Start telling people.  Leave comments on blogs, send e-mails (when you have permission), and spread the word.  Post on your facebook and twitter about it. 

3. Remind often. Put a reminder right up where your visitors will see it everytime they visit.  It takes a lot of repeated exposure before people will actually develope an interest in what they are seeing.  Leave links and make it as easy for them to enter as possible.

Let's get going!  The amount of entries and exposure you get is directly related to the amount of effort you put in.  I didn't realize this at first, and just hoped that people would find me and enter.  It so doesn't work like that for most people; unless your really lucky or get a big break.  I was not lucky.  And it was dissapointing.  Then I developed a new attitude and outlook.  And I reaped the rewards.  You can too.  Don't wait for dissapointment - go and build success!