Comments on: What I Learned Giving Away $60,000 of Prizes in a Week

By: Dimitri

Dimitri — Sun, 11 May 2008 02:45:34 +0000

For me it is a learning experience anyway, hopefully I’ll learn to promote my sites the way you do Darren, great job!!

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:06:08 +0000

Very nice Darren. Giveaways are becoming pretty common on blogs, so I have begun an effort to catalog them and help readers find blog giveaways.

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:51:29 +0000

Feel free to send those sponsors my way! I'm trying to raise the last few gifts for my $1,000 cash giveaway!

By: Rachel Weingarten

Rachel Weingarten — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:33:12 +0000

Hey Darren,

I’m really coming late to this particular party, but interestingly enough have just posted on my brand spanking new blog about the pitfalls of sweepstakes when you don’t do the necessary back end work. Anyway, I have no idea if you worked through rules and regulations and the like, but you might want to keep all of this in mind if you do a giveaway again next year.

Congratulations!
Rachel
(here’s the post I’d mentioned http://coolquotient.blogspot.com/2007/10/sweeping-changes-what-not-to-do-when.html)

By: Marko Pyhajarvi

Marko Pyhajarvi — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:41:00 +0000

Man I just wonder what blogging will be in three years. $54 000 for giveaways! Heh.. I am giving out one music album in http://metal-music-videos.com, worth of $25 :)

Blogging is developing fast. I hope this won’t be a bubble as is was few years ago.

Great weekend for everyone!

By: James Chartrand - JCM Enterprises

James Chartrand - JCM Enterprises — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:25:49 +0000

Great post, Darren. I enjoyed reading this and found it pretty informative.

I have to say one thing: One aspect of the giveaway that greatly disappointed me was being contacted by the winner of the prize, who mentioned he didn’t *want* the prize he’d won from us/you – and no, it wasn’t butt cream and yes, it was online business/blogging related.

There has to be a way to ensure that people who enter the giveaway are actually interested in receiving the prize. Offering many prizes at once without people knowing which they’d get might have been a bad idea in this regard – they’d be hoping for X but end up with Y, something they didn’t want and couldn’t use.

However, regardless of whether the prizewinner wanted his prize or not, I was still proud to be a sponsor of your giveaway and I appreciate your hard work in all this. Congratulations to you and Lara on pulling this bash off with a bang!

By: tony gee

tony gee — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:22:51 +0000

Since I’m sort of a math freak, I was curious as to what kind of device you used to select the winners by. Was there a “random code generator” per se?

By: Bimla

Bimla — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:02:23 +0000

The contest was great. I did win something. The 8 hour give away was also great. I hope some of the traffic that was generated can be sustained. And next time there should some real contest testing some skill or other of the bloggers looking up problogger.
Thanks Darren

By: Mark Penix

Mark Penix — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:21:17 +0000

It was a great cause, and many people participated, I dont think I personally won anything, but then again… I don’t really need anything at this point.

Nice going Darren.

By: Kelvin Kao

Kelvin Kao — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:19:15 +0000

That was a lot of posts indeed. Although I am on my computer a lot, I’ve still not see a few posts until the 8-hour was already over. But I like the fact that you still keep the regular posts coming!

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:56:18 +0000

I finished a month long contest in September where I offered a unique set of prizes each day…it was hard, and ultimately I doubt it did little to add to my unique visitor count…

but, the most important thing that came from it was that I believe i built a stronger set of primary readers…those who check the site out day after day

but eventually, I know they’ll tell their friends

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:06:37 +0000

Hey Darren (and Lara) –

Great job! As a prize donator, next time I would just recommend narrowing down exactly what type of prizes you are looking for…

By: Max Powers at http://ConsumerFight.com

Max Powers at http://ConsumerFight.com — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:02:14 +0000

Because I’m a newcomer to blogging and visit for the advice, the non related prizes didn’t matter to me. I loved the blogging exercises because that’s why I’m here, to learn. I also believe less would be better next time.

Overall? It was fun, interesting, educational, brilliant, tiring, confusing, competitive and must have been rigged because I didn’t win anything. :( (just kidding)

By the way, I still have not received my piece of cake yet. Did you send it FedEx or UPS?

By: A. Nonny Mouse

A. Nonny Mouse — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:30:06 +0000

Well done – it was obviously a huge logistical job and I think you were really smart to bring someone in. A lot of people would have tried to do it on their own.

I’m sure we can all learn a lot from this, even if many of us aren’t doing stuff on quite the same scale.

One small point, only because I am a pedant, but it should be ‘fewer prizes’ and ‘fewer giveaways’ rather than ‘less prizes’ and ‘less giveaways’. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself – it’s a pet peeve.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:29:09 +0000

Great Job, It was a great week, but in the future I don’t think that you should just limit it to blogging related prizes, I think that you will find that some of your subscribers discovered your site looking for one of the non blogging prizes and now have stayed becuause of your content (my non-blogging fiancee independantly found your page, because she wanted to win a truffle tree and then subscribed and told me about the great stuff on your page and that I should sign up for your feed) plus it is fun to win something that you would not necessarily buy for yourself (unlike your blogging prizes)

By: Aruni

Aruni — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:21:35 +0000

Great job! It is really amazing that you pulled this off as smoothly as you did. I learned a lot as a new blogger and was exposed to new blogs and people.

I heard that you (or was it Lara) took the time to comment on the posts people had on their site to enter to win the Monitors. That was thoughtful. Maybe as the dust settles you’ll have time to check out and comment on the reviews some of us did for your $2,000 IttyBiz prize. :-) I had fun doing it.

By: Karthik

Karthik — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:18:42 +0000

Well, it sure was hectic for us – I can imagine how it would have been for you!

But it was fun – and yes, reducing the prizes would give more value to sponsors and would be less of an ordeal to you too.

By: Blogopinion

Blogopinion — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:45:37 +0000

Birthday bash giveaway was a really awesome idea. Reader were enjoying to participate in the giveaway. To post their comment on the top, they decided to subscribe. I like the poem competition .

By: Guillermo

Guillermo — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:31:26 +0000

My question is… Was it worth it? Did you get what you were looking for or after a couple of days everything went back to normal?

By: Sonia Simone

Sonia Simone — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:09:31 +0000

I thought it was a lot of fun! I would agree with all of your “lessons learned,” and next year you may be able to do more pre-party planning, which usually helps mitigate the headaches.

I was excited to be a prize sponsor, and I found some very interesting sites for other sponsors as well.