How to do a Giveaway on YouTube (The Easy Way)

Looking for a quick and easy tutorial on how to do a giveaway on YouTube?

Giveaways are great for increasing your site’s traffic, engagement, and sales. But creating one from scratch can be a real pain. You either have to take care of the entire contest manually or you have to custom develop a software to manage the giveaway for you.

In short: Giveaways can take up a lot of time, money, and effort.

The good news is that there’s a better way. If you’re running a WordPress site, you can set up a giveaway for your YouTube audience with very quickly with a plugin. Best of all, you can afford the plugin even if you’re running a small business.

In this article, we’ll show you how to do a giveaway on YouTube from a WordPress site step by step.

Let’s dive in.

Why Run a Giveaway on YouTube?

Running a giveaway on YouTube is a fantastic strategy for several reasons:

1. Audience Expansion: Giveaways are a magnet for attracting new viewers. By offering something desirable, you can entice people who haven’t interacted with your channel before. Once they’re on your channel for the giveaway, they may discover your other content and subscribe, expanding your audience base.
2. Enhanced Engagement: A well-structured giveaway can significantly boost viewer interaction. Encouraging viewers to like, comment, or share your video to participate can amplify your content’s reach and improve its performance in YouTube’s algorithm. This heightened engagement not only improves the visibility of the giveaway video but can positively impact your subsequent content as well.
3. Brand Partnerships and Sponsorships: Hosting a giveaway can be an excellent opportunity to collaborate with brands or sponsors. By featuring their products or services as prizes, you can foster business relationships, which can lead to more sponsored content and additional revenue streams. It’s also a way to provide value to sponsors by giving them exposure to your audience.
4. Community Loyalty and Trust Building: Regular giveaways can help in building a loyal community. They show your audience that you value their support and are willing to give back. This can foster a stronger, more personal connection with your viewers, increasing their trust in your brand and their likelihood to advocate for your channel.
5. Data Collection and Audience Insights: Giveaways can be structured to gather valuable data. For instance, asking participants to fill out a simple form can provide insights into your audience demographics, preferences, and feedback. This information is gold for tailoring your future content and marketing strategies.
6. Social Media Synergy: Encouraging participants to follow your other social media accounts as part of the giveaway can enhance your cross-platform presence. This not only increases your overall reach but also ensures that your audience is engaged with your brand across different mediums.
7. Viral Potential: If the prize is particularly enticing or unique, there’s a chance your giveaway could go viral. This can lead to exponential growth in a short period, far beyond your existing audience.

In short, a YouTube giveaway can create a win-win situation where your audience gets the excitement of potentially winning something, and you get increased visibility and engagement.

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How to do a Giveaway on YouTube (Step-By-Step)

Now that you understand why you should run giveaways, let’s check out how to do a giveaway on YouTube.

Step #1: Start With Your Goals

Before you dive into creating a giveaway, you have to be sure about your goals. Otherwise, no matter how much money you spend, your contest won’t work. What is the one result you want the most?

Do you want to increase your subscribers?

Or maybe you want to promote your community?

Do you need more paid memberships? Or are you looking for direct sales on your site? Maybe you want to promote an affiliate brand?

There’s no wrong answer here. But you need to have clear expectations and your goals will dictate everything about your giveaway. Not to mention, it’s going to be way easier to measure success once your giveaway is over.

Step #2: Check Out YouTube’s Rules and Regulations for Giveaways

YouTube has some strict rules about the type of contests you can create and the types of rewards you can offer. If you’re not careful about the kind of content use on your videos. Before you create a giveaway on YouTube, check out YouTube’s contest policies and guidelines.

The YouTube giveaway rules in the first section to pay attention to are as follows:

• You must commit to and abide by YouTube’s Privacy Policy, YouTube Community Guidelines, and Terms of Service.
• Don’t infringe upon or encourage the copyright or 3rd party rights of users.
• It must be free to enter the giveaway. Make sure you check the lottery laws in your local jurisdiction.
• You and any 3rd party mustn’t manipulate metrics on the YouTube service, including numbers of views, YouTube likes, dislikes, or subscribers.
• Don’t suggest your contest is affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube without their consent.
• You also HAVE to release YouTube from any liability related to your contest. You can do this by adding a notice to your official contest rules.

Also, remember that you cannot ask your contest participants for likes, shares, or subscriptions under the YouTube’s fake engagement policy. So, if you use a WordPress giveaway plugin, you can’t use it to ask viewers to subscribe, comment, like, or view your video.

You can, however, ask your contestants to visit your YouTube channel.

This means that you can’t make engagement a criteria for participating in a YouTube giveaway. But you can create a video explaining the rules for the giveaway.You can then use the video to ask for likes, shares, and subscribes as long as you don’t make it a rule to participate in the giveaway.

Step #3: Choose Your Reward System and Prizes

Next, you’ll need to choose some exciting prizes for the winners. If you’re a brand manager running a YouTube channel for a big brand with a big budget, you can likely offer grand prizes such as:

• All expenses paid for vacations
• Large cash prizes
• Tickets to special events

And more. Of course, we highly recommend sticking to your brand when you pick a gift. If you’re running a channel on tattoo art, you could make a full arm tattoo the grand prize for the winner. But if you’re running a travel vlog, an all expense paid vacation is much more on-brand for you.

But what do you do if you can’t afford something super expensive?

Don’t worry, you can do something super simple such as:

• Shoutouts to the winners in a video
• Include the winner’s name in the video credits
• One of your products or your channel’s merchandise
• A bundle of inexpensive items
• Host Ask Me Anything sessions

You can even collaborate with a bigger brand to get sponsored prizes. Check out this list of contest prize ideas if you need a little inspiration.

Step #4: Pick a Giveaway Type

There are so many ways to host a video contest. Depending on your goal, you can pick a giveaway type that works best for you. The most common giveaway types include:

• Sweepstakes
• Collaboration videos
• User-generated videos
• Polls and surveys

Pro Tip: Don’t create a comment to win giveaway on YouTube. With comment to win contests, you’ll have to manually find all the comments that qualify. Then, you’ll have to make sure that all the comments comply with YouTube’s guidelines and policies. Finally, you’ll have to ensure that there’s no spam.

We recommend only creating giveaways on YouTube that increase genuine engagement using a top-tier WordPress giveaway plugin such as RafflePress.

RafflePress is the most powerful WordPress giveaway plugin. You get a visual builder with the plugin to create and run viral contests. It’s also the only beginner-friendly WordPress giveaway plugin. In our opinion, the paid version of the plugin is worth every penny. But you can also get started for free.

The best part is that you get powerful pre-built templates that are designed to:

• Grow your email list
• Refer friends with word-of-mouth marketing
• Run a giveaway before your site launches
• Grow your Facebook page
• Grow your Twitter followers
• Grow your YouTube channel
• Grow your Instagram following

And you can do all of it with zero coding. You can simply get started using a drag-and-drop giveaway builder:

Take a look at our review of RafflePress, where we explored the features of the plugin in greater depth.

Step #5: Define Your Contest Rules

Next, you’ll need to define your contest rules. This is the last step before you can start running your giveaway. Having concrete rules in place protect you and your giveaway participants. No matter how big or small you are, there are certain legal regulations that you have to comply with.

For instance, you can only run a contest in the US that’s completely free to enter. In the UK, you have to ensure that your contest doesn’t cross international boundaries. That’s illegal unless you’re running a charitable organization.

If you’re in any doubt, seek legal advice to ensure you’re on the right side of the law.

When you’ve got that sorted, put together the rest of your contest information, such as:

• Eligibility: Who can enter your contest?
• Location: Is it an international giveaway, or is it US entries only?
• Entries: How often can a single person enter, or will you allow daily entries?
• Submissions: How long should video submissions be? What should users include in a submission?
• Timing: What are the start and end times/dates for the giveaway?
• Winners: How are the winners chosen, and where will they be announced?

Next, you need to decide what disclaimers you should include alongside your contest to disclose additional information. We highly recommend adding a YouTube and FTC disclaimer.

Here’s an example of a standard disclaimer:

Disclaimer: This video is sponsored by [Company].
Disclaimer: Some of the products featured in this video were provided by [Company].
Disclaimer: The prize for this contest is sponsored and provided by [Company].

The coolest part is that you can automatically generate your giveaway rules using RafflePress. Head over to your RafflePress plugin in WordPress and go to Settings » Giveaway Rules and click on the Generate Rules button:

When you have the terms and conditions created, you can publish your giveaway.

Step #6: Start Running Your Giveaway

Finally, we’re going to create our giveaway using RafflePress. By now, you’ve already installed the plugin. If you haven’t, go ahead install the RafflePress plugin.

After installing and activating RafflePress, go to the RafflePress plugin and click Add New to create a giveaway. Select your giveaway template to get started:

The templates add giveaway actions relevant to your goals automatically. So, if your goal is to build engagement on YouTube, click the Grow Your YouTube Channel template.

You can create your own rewards inside the RafflePress giveaway builder:

Add an image and a description for your contest prizes. When you’re happy with your prize name, description, and image, click on the Done Editing button.

You can also set the date and the time your giveaway will start and end and choose your timezone in the Start and End Time section. When you’re done, click the Save Changes button.

Next, click on the Actions tab to select different ways users can participate in your YouTube giveaway.

Then, you can customize your giveaway look in the Design tab.

If you prefer, you can also upload an image to use as the background. If you’re happy with your changes, click Save.

This will automatically create a giveaway landing page to host your giveaway. We don’t especially recommend using the default landing page. You can create a custom landing page in WordPress easily and add your giveaway to it.

All that’s left is configuring your giveaway settings. As we mentioned earlier, RafflePress makes it super easy to launch giveaways. You can use the Rules Generator Template to get a head start on creating your YouTube contest rules quickly.

When you’re ready to publish your contest, head to Settings » General and edit the landing page permalink under Page Permalink.

All you have to do is use the same link in your YouTube video description.

Step #7: Promote Your Giveaway on YouTube

There’s so much do with launching a giveaway that it’s super easy to forget that you have to promote your giveaway to make it successful. And again, you can promote the giveaway on YouTube directly from RafflePress.

You can use the Refer a Friend action to encourage everyone to share the giveaway and earn an extra entry.

Once that’s done, go ahead and:

• Create an announcement video
• Publish an announcement blog if you have a website
• Create promotional posts across all social media accounts
• Use the announcement video in YouTube cards for your older videos
• Send out an email blast
• Promote your giveaway with a push notification drip series

If you have the budget, you can even run ads to promote the giveaway.

Step #8: Announce Your Winners and Analyse Your Results

Once your giveaway is over, you’ll need to announce the winners and analyse how successful your campaign was.

We recommend announcing your winner with a video. Include some added info such as how many people participated in the giveaway, how you selected the winner(s), and what they won. If you can’t create a full video, even a YouTube Community Post will do. But a video’s much better. Check out this article to learn how to pick a giveaway winner easily.

After announcing the winner, it’s time to analyse your results.

You can check your YouTube video analytics to see how many new views, likes, and new subscribers you gained.

If your goal was more about product sales, you can use MonsterInsights to get detailed analytics in your WordPress dashboard.

Check out this guide to set up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking.

And that’s it!

What to do After You Learn How to do a Giveaway on YouTube

Now that you know how to do a giveaway on YouTube, you should set up a process around it to create multiple giveaways for your channel. Giveaways are the perfect engagement tool for any YouTube site.

Speaking of engagement, you should also start using push notifications to increase your website engagement even beyond the contests. We recommend using PushEngage to send your push notifications. PushEngage is the #1 push notification software in the world.

Not convinced? Check out these articles first:

• Drip Campaigns and Autoresponders For Web Push Notifications
• 5 Benefits of Using Cart Abandonment Push Notification Campaign
• How to Convert Subscribers To Buyers Using Web Push Notifications

If you’re running a Twitch channel as well, you should check out the best WordPress Twitch plugins. And if you haven’t already, get started with PushEngage today!