How to Host a Giveaway on Your WordPress Site (2020)

Looking for how to run a 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 WordPress site.

Benefits of Hosting a Giveaway on WordPress

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 giveaways and online sweepstakes. People can increase their number of entries by subscribing to your newsletter and providing their email address.
• Get more website traffic — Traffic naturally spikes with successful blog giveaways, 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 means more conversions.
• Skyrocket your social media following — Gain brand recognition and use the power of social proof when the number of your social media followers increase. Your audience can get extra entries by referring a friend and bringing you more followers.
• Increase engagement — Build trust with your audience by keeping them active with your brand.

An easy way to successfully run a giveaway that gets you the things on this list is to use the RafflePress plugin. There’s a free version as well as a pro version, so anyone can use it. And it’s one of the easiest to use (and most effective) WordPress contest plugins since it offers pre-built giveaway templates, viral sharing (refer-a-friend), email marketing and CRM integrations, and more.

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

How To Run A Giveaway

Here’s a quick glance at the tutorial if you’d like to jump ahead:

1. Install The RafflePress Plugin
2. Create Your First Giveaway
3. Add Details to Your Giveaway
4. Add Actions & Entry Options to Your Giveaway
5. Customize the Design of Your Giveaway
6. Adjust Your Giveaway Settings
7. Save Your Giveaway
8. Publish Your Giveaway to Your WordPress Site
9. Promote Your Giveaway

Hosting a giveaway on WordPress is simple by using RafflePress and following these simple steps:

Step 1: Install The RafflePress Plugin

RafflePress is one of the best WordPress plugins available for hosting a giveaway, and it’s getting more and more popular by the day (especially since there’s a free version).

However, you’ll definitely want to check out the perks of upgrading to RafflePress Pro since it offers some fantastic features like viral sharing (refer-a-friend), email marketing 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 giveaway.

Step 2: Create Your First Giveaway

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

Next, name your 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 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

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

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 options 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.

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 a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or YouTube action (An Instagram giveaway is a great way to encourage others to tag a friend right now).
• 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’s 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, choose the value of points someone will earn by completing that action, make the action mandatory for entry, allow daily entries, enter the related 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 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 guidelines and 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 Gutenberg (the newer WordPress 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 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.

Final Thoughts

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

Now that your traffic is about to go wild from your successful giveaway, make sure you’re forms are set up and ready for your visitors by reading our article on the best free contact form plugins for WordPress.

And if you like this blog post, then please be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more WordPress tutorials.