How to Host a Giveaway Online (2023 Full Guide)

Looking for how to run a WordPress giveaway online? Hosting a contest is a fantastic (and super fun) way to explode your online growth.

In this step-by-step tutorial, we’ll show you exactly how to easily host a giveaway on your website.

What Are the Benefits of Doing a Giveaway on Your WordPress Site?

There are tons of great reasons to host a giveaway online. They’re used in many different types of marketing campaigns to grow small businesses online. If it’s executed properly, a giveaway can be an excellent way to:

• Promote a new product or service — You can drive excitement among your email subscribers and followers for something you’re selling, even before it’s released.
• Grow your email list — Growing your email list happens quickly with successful online sweepstakes, giveaways, and contests. People can increase their number of entries by subscribing to your newsletter and providing their email addresses.
• Get more website traffic — Successful blog giveaways are a natural way to drive traffic to your site, especially if you have a giveaways page on your site or success redirection where you redirect entrants to another page.
• Get more leads and new customers — Grow revenue through lead generation and additional sales as more readers mean more conversions. A giveaway is a perfect way to increase brand awareness, especially if you offer prizes like coupons or gift cards for your products or services.
• Skyrocket your social media following — Gain brand recognition like those powerful bloggers you see and use the power of social proof when the number of your social media followers increases. Your audience can get extra entries through referrals and bringing you new followers with the right hashtags.
• Increase engagement — Build trust with your target audience by keeping them active with your brand, even after your giveaway ends.

So now that you know all the powerful things you can do by running a successful giveaway on WordPress, let’s take a peek at exactly how to host a giveaway on your website with a giveaway plugin for WordPress next.

Is It Illegal to Do a Giveaway?

Giveaways are not illegal, but to host a legal giveaway, you’ll have to follow certain laws. Also, if you’re running a social media contest as part of your giveaway, you’ll need to follow the rules of the platform you’re using.

If you’re not sure whether your WordPress giveaway is legal, we recommend getting professional legal advice.

How to Host A Giveaway in WordPress

Check out how to easily run a giveaway on your WordPress site below.

Step 1: Install the RafflePress Plugin

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin and one of the best giveaway tools available. It makes it easy to host a giveaway on your blog, eCommerce store, or small business website. There’s a free version as well as paid plans, so anyone can use it, and it’s a great Gleam, Wishpond, or Rafflecopter alternative.

However, you’ll definitely want to check out the perks of upgrading to RafflePress Pro, a premium version, since it offers some fantastic features like pre-built giveaway templates, viral sharing (refer-a-friend), email marketing and CRM integrations, and more.

To install the plugin, go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins » Add New.

Type RafflePress in the search bar and click Install Now.

Now that you’ve activated the plugin, you’re ready to create your simple giveaway.

Step 2: Create Your First Giveaway

Scroll down the page and click on the orange Create Your First Giveaway button.

Next, name your new giveaway and select the pre-built giveaway template you’d like to use. For this tutorial, we’ll pick a classic giveaway.

If you’d like to focus on a specific goal as you host a WordPress giveaway, the pro version of RafflePress lets you choose from many additional (and highly effective) pre-built giveaway templates like:

• Grow Your Email List
• Pre-launch Campaign
• Grow Your Facebook Page
• Grow Your Instagram Following
• Refer-a-Friend Viral Giveaway
• Grow Your Twitter Following
• Grow Your YouTube Channel

Browsing the templates should help you generate lots of giveaway ideas. All are a fantastic way to grow your audience by hosting a giveaway.

Step 3: Add Details to Your Giveaway

Now that you’ve picked your template, you need to add all the details of your online contest.

First, click on the box with the pencil on the left-hand panel to provide a title, description, and image (Pro) for your prize.

In this Giveaway Prize Details section you can also:

• Add additional prizes by clicking on the +Add Another Prize button
• Set the start and end dates of your contest
• Set your time zone.

Want to host a giveaway but can’t think of a prize? It’s easy to offer a gift card or a coupon instead of a physical prize.

Step 4: Add Actions & Entry Options to Your Giveaway

One of the most wonderful things about RafflePress is that it has tons of actions and entry methods for you to add to your online contest. That way, you can completely customize your giveaway to fit your goals and your WordPress website’s goals by setting your custom entry requirements.

To add an action and edit its entry options, click on the Actions tab on the left-hand panel.

Some possible online growth goals and the suggested entry option actions are to:

• Get more email subscribers — Add the Join an Email Newsletter action.
• Get more social media followers — Add social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube action (An Instagram giveaway or “Instagram contest” is a great way to encourage others to tag a friend right now. This skyrockets your Instagram followers.)
• Increase social engagement — Add a Refer-a-Friend (Viral Sharing) action or a Watch a Video action.
• Grow your website traffic — Add a Tweet a Message or Visit a Page action.
• Get user-generated content like from a video contest — Add a Invent Your Own action.

There are a lot of other actions to choose from when you host your giveaway, but hopefully, those are some solid ideas to get you started.

And, each action has entry options that can be customized once you click on the + symbol on that action.

Here you can change:

• The title of the action
• The value of points a contestant will earn by completing that action
• Whether the action is mandatory or not
• Whether you’ll allow daily entries
• The page you want them to visit, like your Instagram account URL
• and more.

Step 5: Customize the Design of Your Giveaway

To make your giveaway look even more slick, you can customize the design to match your brand’s colors.

To start, click on the Design tab on the left-hand side.

On this page, you can adjust your giveaway’s

• Layout
• Fonts
• Button Color
• Background (Color or Image)
• Custom CSS

Once you feel good about the style and look of your giveaway, you’re ready to adjust the settings. You’re so close to running your giveaway!

Step 6: Adjust Your Giveaway Settings

RafflePress gives you tons of options to customize your giveaway even more in the settings panel.

First things first, you should enter your contest rules. Lets do that before we adjust any other settings.

To get started, click on the Settings tab with the gear icon. Then, select Giveaway Rules and click on the orange + Generate Rules button.

Next, enter all the details of your WordPress giveaway on the page that popped up and click on the Generate Rules button at the bottom of the generator.

RafflePress will then use the information you entered and generate basic giveaway disclaimers, guidelines, or rules.

Also, on this setting page, you can do many other things like:

• Enable email verification
• Success tracking
• Social logins
• Display your giveaway winners
• Success redirection
• and more…

Step 7: Save Your Giveaway

Once the details, actions, design, and settings of your giveaway are customized to your liking, don’t forget to click the Save button in the top right corner.

Step 8: Publish Your Giveaway to Your WordPress Site

The final step is to publish your giveaway on your website. To do this, RafflePress offers 3 options:

• RafflePress WordPress Block – Embed the giveaway in your post or page in the WordPress block editor
• WordPress Shortcode – Use the Classic WordPress editor and embed the giveaway using a shortcode
• Giveaway Landing Page – Build a standalone landing page for your giveaway

In this example, we’re using a WordPress block.

Create a new page or post and then click on the + icon to locate the RafflePress widget.

Select the giveaway you want to embed into your WordPress site from the list.

Now click on the Publish button in the top right corner to embed the giveaway onto your site.

You may also want to try a landing page for a distraction-free experience:

And there you have it. You’ve now created your WordPress giveaway in just a few clicks, without knowing any code — great job!

Step 9: Promote Your Giveaway

Make sure to share your giveaway on all of your social networks, your email newsletter, and through other online communities, forms, friends, and influencers.

You’ll want to create a giveaway post on your WordPress blog to promote your new competition. And you can create an Instagram post for your giveaway after putting the link in your bio.

Step 10: Pick a Giveaway Winner

RafflePress makes it easy to choose the winner when you host a giveaway.

When your contest closes, a Pick Winner button appears. You can choose the number of prizes and get RafflePress to pick a random winner for each of them.

Now all you need to do is get in touch with your winner and send them the prize! Then, you can move on to your next giveaway and focus on your future digital marketing giveaway campaigns.

Next, Host a Giveaway with a Contest Form

It’s really that simple! You now know exactly how to host a giveaway with a WordPress giveaway plugin to get more followers and traffic. Get started and create a giveaway for free with RafflePress today.

Did you know that you can also use WPForms to run giveaways? To find out how, check out this article on creating a WordPress contest form.

Also, an important part of any contest or giveaway is managing who can enter and how many entries you’ll accept. The WPForms Form Locker addon gives you the ability to restrict form submissions by age, login status, and more. Plus you can limit the number of entries and set a date to close your contest form.

Create Your WordPress Form Now

Ready to build a contest form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

If this article helped you out, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more free WordPress tutorials and guides.