Doubling website visits and maintaining current visitors is the biggest goal for almost all website owners, and one of the methods that has a significant impact on doubling the number of visits is offering free gifts to visitors in exchange for simple actions they take, which is known as giveaway.
In this article, you will learn about the importance of using giveaway within your site in order to double site visits, in addition to ways to activate it within WordPress using plugins.
What is giveaway and the importance of activating it on the site?
In short, we can define giveaway as a competition launched for site visitors, in which participants carry out some simple requests, such as visiting your social media pages and following up, or sending an email, or other simple things that anyone can do easily.
At the end of the competition, a random selection of a number of participants who have completed the tasks required of them is made, and they are given some incentive gifts.
Bloggers and online store owners use giveaway to encourage visitors to interact within the platform, which helps increase brand dissemination, especially since the tasks required in it are very simple and can be done by anyone without experience or special skill.
We will explain how to activate giveaway on your site using WordPress plugins, but before that we must point out that it is necessary to make a new plan for the competition and determine the gifts that will be given to the winners in the end. These are some of the things that you can take into consideration in order to create a successful competition that enhances the spread and success of the competition. Your brand online:
- Determine the goal of the competition first, whether your goal is to increase followers on social media platforms by launching the competition, or encouraging users to visit the website or blog, attend a live broadcast , register their email, or something else.
- Determine the gifts that will be sent to the winners of the competition, and be sure to provide valuable gifts that encourage them to participate.
- Activate the sharing system, meaning that if a contestant shares the competition link with a friend, he will receive additional points for it.
- Make it an essential step to put an email on the site, so that you collect the contestants’ contact information for easy access to them later.
- Use a WordPress plugin that provides you with all the options required to create giveaway contests the way you want, which you will learn about in the following paragraphs of the article.
WordPress plugins to create giveaway on the site
Have you defined the goal of launching giveaway contests on your site? So you are now ready to start the practical steps.
There are many WordPress plugins that help activate the giveaway contest system on the site in an easy way, and these plugins vary between free and paid depending on the options provided by each plugin and the ease of use.
We will review for you many free and other paid plugins, and we will start with one of the free plugins that you can use without any subscription or fees, as it is available on the official plugins store for WordPress, and then we will point out the most famous paid plugins that provide more options for creating competitions in a very professional way. .
Add Simple Giveaways
One of the free plugins that you can use to create contests of this type on your site and that you get easily is the Simple Giveaways plugin from the WordPress plugin store .
After installing and activating the add-on on the site , go to the add-on settings panel to start creating the first Giveaways contest on your site easily, by clicking on the Add New Contest button :
When you open the new contest add page, you will first be asked to add a title for the contest, as this title will appear at the top of the contest page on your site, as well as a short description that explains to visitors the purpose of participation and also encourages them to spread the contest link to friends.
Once you write the title and description for the competition and click the publish button on the competition editing page, the competition will be published and you can click on its link to test the format of the competition:
When you visit the competition link, you will find a page containing the competition title and description, and an e-mail field where visitors can enter their email and click the Enter button to participate in the competition with ease:
Note: You can translate the English texts that appear on the competition page into such as Seconds, Minutes, Hours, and Enter using one of the WordPress translation plugins such as Loco translate, as the plugin does not provide the option to modify the texts by default.
In this case, as you noticed, the competition consists of adding an email only, then visitors wait for the end of the competition and choose the winners from the competition participants.
But you can make the competition more useful and more interesting, by adding tasks other than writing an email. The addition provides 3 other tasks that you can assign within the competition. You can access the additional tasks from within the competition editing page, then go to the Extra Entries tab :
As you can see, you can add 3 other options in addition to the task of writing the e-mail, which are:
- Visit a link : In this task, you add a link inside or outside your site so that participants can visit the link to increase the chance of profit.
- Create an account Register on the site. You can activate this task so that users create an account on the site, which increases the chance of profit.
- Post a comment , which is a task in which visitors post a comment on your site, and thus the chance of profit increases as well.
You can also control all the settings for the competition, such as the start and end date of the competition, which you can specify from within the same page in the timing schedule tab for the competition. Set the start date and the end date :
After launching the competition, you can get to know the people who participated in the competition and see the tasks they completed, by entering the Entries tab, where the participants’ data will appear to you:
This add-on, as you noticed, provides you with some basic options for creating a giveaway contest on your site, but the paid version of it, as well as the rest of the paid add-ons, provides you with the ability to add more advanced tasks such as sharing content on social media sites, watching the YouTube channel, and other tasks that help you make greater use of the giveaway. Contests on your site.
Add RafflePress
You can use the Rafflepress add-on , which is a paid add-on whose prices start at $39.5 USD. It is another option for creating giveaway contests in a more professional way, as the add-on provides many options that you do not get from free add-ons.
The most prominent feature of the add-on is that it is compatible with all email operation and management services on the site, which helps you link it to your site’s mail service provider, and begin collecting email addresses and running marketing services via mail to increase the spread of your site to a larger segment of the audience.
The add-on also provides ready-made design templates for creating competitions, which makes it easier for you to create many types of competitions within your site. You can also add links to your accounts on social media sites for the purpose of increasing followers and interaction on them.
Add WPForms
If you use the Wpforms plugin on your site to create and manage different contact forms, you can also use it to create giveaway contests as well without having to install more plugins because this option is built into the plugin by default.
The add-on provides ready-made templates for designing contests, so you will not need to put a lot of effort into designing and creating contest templates within your site, as it provides you with a drag-and-drop feature, which helps you create contest templates in a few minutes.
The feature of creating contests in the WPForms plugin is only available in the paid version, which starts at $31 per year for one site.
Add Gleam
If you want an alternative option that costs you only $10 per month in order to try the competitions without purchasing an add-on and paying an annual subscription to try it, then this add-on is a suitable option for you.
This service is not available as a WordPress plugin, which makes it completely unsuitable for beginners, as you register an account on its official website and start designing the competitions you want, and in the end you get a short code that you paste inside your site on the pages or articles you want. In the emergence of the competition within it.
Thus, you now have many free and paid options as well in order to start creating a giveaway, as this type of competition contributes to increasing brand awareness, and is used by e-store owners in particular for the purpose of increasing the spread of the brand and also doubling store visits in order to double sales. .
Before creating a giveaway on your site or store, create a good plan before starting implementation, as the gifts that are given to the contestants and the winners among them must be completely clear before the start of the competition, and you must also determine the number of winners at the end of the competition, and announce the winners with great transparency. In order to gain the trust of your visitors or customers.
