Looking for some suggestions on blog giveaway best practices.

[NoahsDad]

I am at the point on our blog where I want to start doing giveaways. A publisher recently gave me some books to give away, and so I plan on starting with that. (Although later I plan on doing some bigger items.)

This will be the first time I've done a give away and looking for some best practices.

Our Facebook page has about 13,000 fans and so asking for more "LIKES" to enter the contest for a give away may not be the best way since a lot of our readers are already fans on Facebook. (Not to mention I would much rather have engagement on our page vs. people just randomly liking the page.)

One idea I have is just a simple "leave a comment with the title of the last book you read below" and than "receive a bouns entry if you sign up to receive our blog posts via email." The question I have for this is how do I know who signed up for the email? Do they just leave a 2nd comment saying they did? If so, how do I know they actually did without going through and verifying each person actually did. (Which could take a long time.)

I'm open to any other ideas as well.

The other question I had is in regard to SEO. Is this the kind of post where SEO doesn't really matter? Meaning, I don't really want to rank for people searching for that book since if my page did rank high for that phrase, there isn't anything on the post really about the book; so it wouldn't be helpful for the person searching. I'm assuming you just title the post something "Giving away 5 Free copies of This Awesome Book," or something like that....and not really worry about trying to rank for that post in any way.

Again, this is new to me, so I'm open to any ideas, feedback, blog contests you have done, or other posts that talk about this.

Thanks!

[Stevej24]

Nice site, by the way.

We've had good responses to contests that asked for the reader to leave a comment.

I like your idea of having  the readers opt in to recieve the blog posts by email.

[jennita]

Hi! I think you're on the right track with your thinking. I'm sorry this is a bit late and I haven't checked if you've already started the giveaway. I like the idea a lot of having people comment on the post, and that will start some conversation going there. We did something similar with giving away a book for our book club on LinkedIn.

How do you have your newsletter set up? It might be easier to actually have people send a specific tweet to get an extra entry rather than to sign up for the newsletter. Perhaps you can push signing up for the newsletter another way. You really want people who care about getting the content and not just a bunch of numbers, right?

I would always keep SEO in mind as you write posts, but I think you're right that it's not something you'll need to be overly optimized on with this one. There are times where you want your post to rank for specific keywords, and times where the focus is current content, not necessarily something that people will care about in 2 months.

Hope this helps a bit! Let us know how it goes.

Jen

[NoahsDad]

Thanks for your feedback. I just posted my first giveaway today: we'll see how it goes.

Feel free to check out the link and let me know how I did.

[jennita]

It looks really great!