How to Create a Giveaway Online (Step-by-Step Guide)

Giveaways are one of the fastest ways I know to get people genuinely excited about a brand. A good prize, a simple way to enter, and a little promotion can bring in new email subscribers, social followers, and website traffic.

The part that trips most people up is the setup. How do you actually build the thing, keep it fair, and stay on the right side of the rules? That is exactly what I want to clear up here.

In this guide I’ll walk you through how to create a giveaway from start to finish. You can run it on social media, through a dedicated giveaway tool, or right on your own WordPress site.

What Are the Benefits of Running a Giveaway?

There are plenty of good reasons to run a giveaway online, and marketers use them in all sorts of campaigns to grow a small business. Done well, a giveaway is a great way to:

• Promote a new product or service: You can build excitement among your subscribers and followers for something you’re launching, even before it goes on sale.
• Grow your email list: People happily hand over an email address for a shot at a prize, which makes a contest one of the quickest ways to grow your email list.
• Get more website traffic: A giveaway gives people a reason to visit your site, especially when you host the entry page there and send everyone to it.
• Generate leads and sales: More visitors means more chances to turn readers into customers, and a well-targeted prize brings in exactly the kind of people you want on your list.
• Grow your social media following: Entry actions like following your account or tagging a friend introduce your brand to a much wider audience.
• Increase engagement: A contest keeps your audience active and interested in your brand, and that momentum often carries on after the giveaway ends.

Types of Giveaways You Can Run

Not every giveaway works the same way, and the type you pick shapes how people enter and what you get out of it. Here are the main formats worth knowing before you start.

• Sweepstakes: The classic prize draw. People enter, and you pick a winner at random. It’s the simplest format and the easiest for people to join, which usually means the most entries.
• Contest: Entrants create something and you judge it, like a photo, a video, or a caption. Contests take more effort to enter, so you get fewer entries, but the user-generated content you collect can be worth far more than the reach.
• Refer-a-friend giveaway: Each person earns extra entries by inviting others. This is what makes a giveaway go viral, since every entrant becomes a promoter.
• Social media giveaway: Entry happens through likes, follows, shares, or tags on a platform like Instagram or Facebook. If you want ideas for this format, these Facebook giveaway ideas are a good starting point, and a like-and-share contest is one of the easiest to set up.

Most successful giveaways mix a few of these, running a sweepstakes on your website while offering bonus entries for following you on social media and referring a friend.

Is It Legal to Run a Giveaway?

Giveaways are perfectly legal, but there are a few rules you need to follow to keep yours above board. I’m not a lawyer, so treat this as a starting point rather than legal advice, and check with a professional if you’re unsure.

The big one in the US is that you can’t require a purchase to enter. Doing so can turn your giveaway into an illegal lottery, so you always need to offer a free way to enter, often called a free alternative method of entry.

Keeping entry free also brings in more people, so it works in your favor anyway. You’ll also want a clear set of official rules. Spell out who is eligible to enter, how people enter, the start and end dates, and how you’ll choose and contact the winner.

If any part of your giveaway runs on social media, read that platform’s promotion guidelines too, since sites like Instagram and Facebook have their own requirements for contests. A good giveaway tool takes most of this off your plate by generating rules for you, which I’ll show you a bit later.

How to Create a Giveaway in WordPress (Step by Step)

I’ll walk you through building and hosting a giveaway on your WordPress site now, from installing the plugin to picking your winner. The steps below use RafflePress, though the same general workflow applies whichever giveaway tool you choose.

Step 1: Install the RafflePress Plugin

First, you’ll need to decide on the platform where you’ll host your giveaway. Many giveaways are hosted on social media, but today we’ll focus on hosting on your WordPress website.

That said, we’ll show you how to use your social media to share, promote, and announce your giveaway results in conjunction with your website, so that you’re covering the most ground possible.

In terms of your WordPress platform, RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin and one of the most useful giveaway tools available. RafflePress 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. Plus, it’s a great Gleam, Wishpond, or Rafflecopter alternative.

While the free version is great, you’ll definitely want to check out the perks of upgrading to RafflePress Pro, the premium version of the plugin.

This version 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 think about the goals of your online giveaway.

Step 2: Set Your Giveaway Goals

Before you build anything, get clear on what you want out of this. Your goal decides your prize, your entry actions, and how you promote the whole thing.

Are you looking to increase your brand awareness? Your online giveaway is a great way to introduce your brand to a wider audience, and often results in more subscribers and social media followers.

Or, perhaps you’re hoping to increase engagement with your brand. Use your WordPress giveaway as a means to generate more comments on your website and shares of your posts.

Another goal you may consider with your giveaway is to generate more customer leads and sales. Creating, promoting, and announcing your WordPress giveaway can help you convert more site visitors into customers, and make more sales on your site.

If you’d like to focus on an even more specific goal with your WordPress giveaway, the pro version of RafflePress lets you choose from many highly effective pre-built giveaway templates to help you:

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

Step 3: Create Your Giveaway

Now that you have your goals in mind, it’s time to create your giveaway! For this tutorial, we’ll continue using the RafflePress plugin to create and host our WordPress giveaway.

First, navigate to the RafflePress plugin that you’ve installed and activated in your WordPress dashboard. 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.

Browsing the templates should help you generate lots of giveaway ideas. And remember, many of these templates are made specifically with your giveaway goals in mind.

Any one of them would be a fantastic way to grow your audience, generate leads, or convert website visitors into customers.

Step 4: Choose a Prize

Next, you need to choose a prize for your giveaway. Be sure to offer a prize that your audience will actually be interested in so that you have a good chance for higher participation. So, what will you give away? A new product from your collection? A specific type of service?

We suggest choosing a prize that is closely aligned with your brand and that will give your participants a broader idea of what your website offers. Perhaps you’ll offer a limited-edition product from your site, or a prize provided by a brand you’re partnered with.

Back in Rafflepress, it’s time to add the details of your prize to the template you’ve selected. 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 same section you can also:

• Add more prizes: Click the + Add Another Prize button to run multiple prizes at once.
• Set your dates: Choose the start and end dates for your contest.
• Set your time zone: Make sure the closing time lands where your audience actually is.

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

Step 5: Add Entry Actions

Next, you’ll add more details to your giveaway. How are you going to get your audience involved? Oftentimes, online giveaways encourage participants to follow, subscribe, share, or engage with your brand.

One of the most useful 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 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.

Match your actions to your goal. A few that work well:

• Grow your email list: Add the Join an Email Newsletter action.
• Get more followers: Add follow actions for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or YouTube.
• Go viral: Add a Refer-a-Friend action so entrants earn bonus entries for inviting others.
• Drive traffic: Add a Visit a Page or Watch a Video action.
• Collect content: Add an Invent Your Own action to gather photos or video entries.

Once you’ve added an action, click the plus (+) icon on it to set the entry value, decide whether it’s required, allow daily entries, and add any links it needs, like your Instagram profile.

But don’t stop here, because we have even more customization options available with RafflePress.

Step 6: Customize the Design and Rules

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.

From here you can change the layout, fonts, button color, and background to match your site, and add your own Custom CSS if you want finer control.

Once the design feels right, open the Settings tab with the gear icon and start with your rules. Select Giveaway Rules and click the orange + Generate Rules button.

Next, enter all the details of your WordPress giveaway on the page that pops 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.

While you’re in Settings, you can also turn on email verification, success tracking, social logins, winner display, and success redirection to send entrants to a thank-you page.

Step 7: Save and Publish Your Giveaway

Once the details, actions, design, and settings of your giveaway are customized to your liking, be sure to click the Save button in the top right corner.

Then, 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. To use a WordPress block, create a new page or post and then click on the plus (+) 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 8: 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.

Why not create a hashtag for your giveaway to use all over your favorite social media sites? Don’t forget to invite the influencers and brands you’re collaborating with to use this hashtag, too.  

And while you’re at it, go ahead and create an Instagram post for your giveaway after putting the link in your bio. You’ll also want to create a giveaway post on your WordPress blog to promote your new competition.

Another great addition to your WordPress site would be a popup on your homepage to direct visitors to your giveaway. There are lots of ways to share information about your giveaway, and you should invite your participants and website audience to share it, too.

Step 9: Pick and Announce Your Winner

Finally, it’s time to pick and announce your winner. And RafflePress makes it incredibly easy for you to fairly choose the winner of your 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! You can send them an email or notification through your WordPress website to them know what steps to take in order to claim their prize.

Be sure to also make an announcement on your social media, too. After privately contacting your giveaway winner, boost your credibility by publicly announcing the results of your giveaway.

That way, participants who didn’t win will know that the giveaway has ended and that you’ve followed through with your prize.

FAQs About Creating a Giveaway

Creating a giveaway raises a lot of the same questions, whether you’re running your first contest or your tenth. Here are the ones I hear most often.

How do I create a giveaway for free?

You can create a giveaway for free with the free version of RafflePress. It gives you the drag-and-drop builder, entry actions like following on social media and joining your email list, and the block and shortcode options to publish it on your WordPress site. You only need a paid plan once you want templates or viral refer-a-friend sharing.

What is the best platform to run an online giveaway?

If your audience is on your own website, a WordPress giveaway plugin like RafflePress is the best choice because you keep every entry and email address.

Hosted tools like Gleam and Woobox work well if you want everything managed off-site, and social platforms are fine for quick, low-effort contests where you don’t need to collect data.

Is it legal to run an online giveaway?

Yes, as long as you follow the rules. In the US the main requirement is that you can’t force people to buy something to enter, so you always offer a free way in.

You also need clear official rules covering eligibility, dates, and how the winner is chosen. Check with a legal professional if you’re running a large or high-value giveaway.

How do I choose a giveaway winner fairly?

The easiest way is to let your giveaway tool draw the winner at random. RafflePress has a Pick Winner button that selects a random entrant for you when the contest ends, which keeps the draw fair and saves you from doing it by hand. Contact the winner privately, then announce them publicly once they’ve confirmed.

Next, Create a Contest Form With WPForms

You now know how to create a giveaway from start to finish, pick the right platform, and choose a winner. Go ahead and create your giveaway for free with RafflePress whenever you’re ready.

Did you know you can also run giveaways with WPForms? If you’d rather collect entries through a simple form, take a look at how to build a contest entry form in WordPress.

Managing who can enter is a big part of any contest, and the WPForms Form Locker addon handles it well. You can limit entries by age, restrict entries to logged-in users, cap the total number of entries, and set a date to close your form automatically.

And if you’d like to reward everyone who enters, not just the winner, learn how to add a coupon code to your form so entrants leave with a discount.

Create Your Contest Entry Form Now

Ready to build your 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.

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