Giveaway Tips / Tech Help For Bloggers

Welcome to the last installment of the Tech Help for Bloggers Series. This series is focused on providing technical tips and advice to help you understand and get the most out of your blogging experience. Here is the schedule of posts:

• July 1       Getting Started / Intro to HTML
• July 4       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 1 / Blog and social media buttons
• July 8       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 2 / Creating pages and navigation bars
• July 15     Getting to Know the Settings in Blogger / Your blog, behind the scenes
• July 22     Layouts and Templates in Blogger / How to change your blog's look
• July 26     CSS and Web Fonts / How to use custom fonts for your blog
• July 29     Organizing Events / Creating forms, polls, and sharable documents
• Aug 1       Hosting A Linky Party / Guest Post w/ Laura of TGIFF! and Quokka Quilts
• Aug 5       Pinterest and Flickr / Features for managing image sharing
• Aug 12     Giveaways / Technical tips and tricks for hosting a successful giveaway

Today we are looking at tools to help with giveaways.

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There are a number of easy to use tools that can really help make hosting a giveaway easier. If you have a blogger hosted blog, you may find my previous post on adding numbered comments to your blog helpful. It's really easy to do (I promise!).

No-Reply Comment Blogger

As a giveaway participant, you might also be interested in reading more about the terrible blight know as the No-Reply Comment Blogger. ; ) If you happen to be one, and don't realize it, you won't be able to win most giveaways or receive responses to your comments simply because there won't be any way to contact you through your profile. Jodi, at Pleasant Home, has written up a fantastic post about how to diagnose and cure oneself of the No-Reply blight and thus greatly improve one's chances of winning all future giveaways. I kid (a little)! 

Also if you have recently linked your blogger account over to Google+, you may also have inadvertently gained No-Reply status. Jenniffier has a fix for you too over at her blog, Jenniffier's Sometimes Creative Life.

Drawing a Random Number

Random.org is a helpful site for drawing a random number giveaway winner. Right on the front page of the website they have a simple random number generator that allows you to enter in your giveaway parameters, your number of entries for instance, and in turn receive back a random number that should correspond to your winner (this is where the number comments come in handy). It's really easy to use.

Taking a Screen Shot Selection

Now that you have your random number generated and ready to go with a corresponding winner, you may want to take a screen shot to visually show the winning number when you post your giveaway announcement. This seems like it should be easy enough (and for those you who already have figured out how to do this, it is!), but frankly the tools on your computer that allow you to do this are pretty well hidden on just about every operating system. Here is a quick rundown of how to access these tools on both Mac and Windows based machines:

-Mac-

Applications-> Utilities-> Grab

Accessing the menus in the top bar, click "Capture", then select the type of screen shot you would like to make (I recommend "Selection" for this purpose)

-Windows-

CTRL-PRSC (Print Screen Button) then edit using a graphics program (like Microsoft Paint)

-or-

Snip Tool (Windows Vista and higher)

-Go into the "Control Panel"

-Click on "Programs" then "Programs and Features"

-Select "Turn Windows features on and off" (from the sidebar)

-Check the box by "Tablet PC Optional Components" and save

You can then find the snip tool by accessing the Start Menu-> All Programs-> Accessories 

You can then make a screen shot of the random number generator box, using your method of choice. Then display it in on your blog, in this case showing winning number 62 (if this were a giveaway). : )

Raffelcopter

Finally, there are also sites that provide pre-made widgets that can be very helpful for organizing giveaways, particularly those with multiple entry options (like tweet this, follow here, etc...). Raffelcopter is one that you have probably already seen. Some love it and some hate it, but I think it's worth mentioning as a viable option. 

One of the drawbacks of using a widget like this is that your giveaway participants must sign in to enter, either with their Facebook account or with their e-mail. For some would-be participants, not wanting to sign in using that information (for privacy and security reasons) could prevent some from entering. It's just something to keep in mind. 

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And since this is the last post in this series, I just wanted to say thanks for following along, for your great questions/ suggestions, and for helping me to troubleshoot code issues. : ) I hope that this series has been helpful and that it's provided a good starting point for some to work towards becoming more comfortable with code. Feel free to continue to send me your questions (I'll post about them periodically) and links to your newly spruced up blogs.

I have really enjoyed getting to see your successes!