The 9 Ways

Online Sweepstakes

Post your giveaway in the forum at Online Sweepstakes.

Contest Blogger

Post your giveaway in the forum at Contest Blogger and on their Facebook page.

SweepAdvantage

Get your giveaway listed on the website SweepAdvantage. Tweeting them your contest usually gets your contest listed there. Check their site to make sure though. You might have to do it manually.

TweetsWin

If retweeting (RT) is the method you are using for contest entry, use TweetsWin to augment your efforts. TweetsWin will tweet out your contest to its followers once you sign up for TweetsWin at their website. Their tweets for you will look like this: Follow (your twitter address) and RT this for a chance to win (the prize you are offering).

Use Hootsuite

Use Hootsuite to pre-write, date, and time tweets about your contest for your Twitter account.

@Tweet

Individually tweet contest, giveaway, and sweepstakes tweeters with a large number of followers, one at a time. If you tweet them en masse, it will look to them like spam and they will be less likely to RT your contest.

YouTube

Create a YouTube Channel for your website, make, and upload a YouTube video about your contest to it. Also, post an update about your contest on your YouTube channel. The update will show in your YouTube Channel Feed and I believe its sent to the inbox of your subscribers as well.

Pinterest

“Pin” your contest on Pinterest via a picture housed on the contest’s post page. Make a “board” on Pinterest labeled Contest or something that lets your board followers know that free prizes are advertised and can be gained in that board.

Facebook

Though you might have your site’s Facebook Fan Page set up to automatically post the articles published on your site (if you do not you should), its a good idea to manually repost it (later on) so people that might have missed the first posting know that the contest is going on. You can also pin the already posted contest to the top of your Facebook page. Click the edit button at the top right of the post and click “Pin on Top”. The post will be pinned to the top of the page for seven days.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many convential and unconvential ways to advertise giveaways, contests, and sweepstakes on the Internet to gain high entries for it.

How many of these advertising methods do you already employ?

Source: Allfacebook

When used properly, Pinterest can become a new source of referral traffic for your website and a new way to communicate what your site has to offer potential visitors and clients.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is

a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and/or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting” via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing. Pinterest allows its users to share ‘pins’ on both Twitter and Facebook, which allows users to share and interact with a broad community.

Why Pinterest should be of interest to a Movie Webmaster

Here is what I found intriguing about Pinterest thus far: Anything you “pin” from your site onto Pinterest is automatically linked to your site. If a person wants to see a larger version of a pinned photo or image, they are taken to the site the pin originated from.

That’s traffic for your site, new traffic, an augmentation to the traffic you already receive from Google, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. This recently happened to ProMovieBlogger.com when the infographic housed in this post: The Brain of the Beginning Blogger Infographic was pinned onto a “board” within Pinterest by one of its users. We continue to get referral traffic from that pinning.

As a webmaster, you post and publish what movie studios’ produce:  posters, set photos, official movie stills, movie trailers, and movie clips. “Pinning” the images and videos (only YouTube videos right now) to Pinterest that you have posted on your site is a another means of drawing attention and traffic to your website and your YouTube posts.

As you can see, there is an interest for movie, film, cinema, and movie trailers on Pinterest. ”To find other [like-minded] Pinners, access the Everything drop-down menu and filter Boards by category.” If not, type in a specific site you like from the Internet. When I did so, I found that other people had already been sharing photos from our movie website. Pinterest catalogs the sites where images come from onto one, convenient source page. Example: a Movie Website Pinterest Source Page.

A Visual Aid

Since Pinterest is all about the visual, this is more than appropriate. The Power of Pinterest Infographic:

The Power of Pinterest Infographic

One downside to contributing to Pinterest

Time. Each and every image or video has to be contributed manually (there is no pin automation on Pinterest yet).

Pinterest has thought of this and has made pinning very easy through Google Chrome.

Drag and drop Pinterest’s Chrome browser extension onto your Bookmarks bar. That way, every time you come across a cute pair of shoes or a kickass motorcycle, you’re able to click “Pin It,” choose an image (left), attach a description and add the Pin to one of your Boards.

You can also add their social button to your posts so your site visitors can click on it and share your content more easily. Certain share button containers like Share This already have Pinterest integrated so adding a specific Pinterest button isn’t necessary if you are using one.

In Conclusion

Pinterest is new, brand new. Getting your foot, your brand, a few pictures, and videos in the door (you can not simply join. You have to ask Pinterest for an invitation) will not hurt.

Pinterest is pretty addictive. Potential visitors to your site through Pinterest feel the same way.

 Source: Wikipedia, Skande, Mashable

Tweet Schedule

Tweet about your contest on the first day of your contest, during the mid-point of the contest, and on the last day of the contest. The first tweet brings the existence of the contest to your

Twitter followers. The second tweet lets them know it is still ongoing and advertises it to those unaware of it. The third and final tweet is for the people that were on the fence of entering your contest and also to bring it to the attention of those that were unaware of its existence up to that point.

When to Tweet the Contest

When Twitter is most heavily trafficked during the day is a good time to tweet about your contest. Common sense told me that time was mid-day and some others feel the same way. From Gary McCaffrey

I have charted them below showing how many visitors came  [to my site] at what hour of the day.

As you can see, the spike is between 12 noon and 2 p.m. From WebsiteDesignNewcastle,

The busiest time on Twitter is GMT 1900-2100 (7pm to 9pm). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out this is lunchtime in the USA and in most Pacific time zones.

The quietest time on Twitter is GMT 0700-0900 (7am to 9am). That’s the midnight shift in the USA.

Hashtags

Get your tweet exactly in front of of the people that we will take action on them and click through to your contest, giveaway, and sweepstakes. Use Hashtags. I spoke about them in this post: How to Advertise your Movie Review aggressively on Twitter. The Hashtags that will make your tweet show up in the right Tweet searches are: Prize, Win, Free, Competition, Contest, Giveaway, DVD, Blu-ray, Movie, Film, and Sweepstakes. This modus operandi requires you to manually tweet your contests, most automated service will not add Hashtags, they will only tweet the title of the post and a redirect URL. If a service orb plugin does allow the use of Hastags, it will add those Hashtags to all your tweeted posts.

In the beginning

I usually begin my contest, giveaway, or sweepstakes tweet with WIN, in all caps. This signifies that there is something to be gained – a prize – by clicking through the link provided. It’s incentive advertising within your tweet.

In Conclusion

Use every social medium you can to promote your contest, giveaway and sweepstakes, especially Twitter. Billboard your contest instantly on Twitter during high traffic times and maximize the eyes on your contest tweets with the appropriate Hashtags.

Why a YouTube Channel?

Why not? Giving you step-by-step advice in a written format is one thing. Showing you in a video is a far better instructive tool.

Take Part

If you have a profile on YouTube, subscribe to us so that you never miss any of our video updates or if you want to be buddies, friend us. What would you like to see on our YouTube Channel? Do you own a movie website and have your own YouTube Channel? Are you signed up to YouTube? Let us know below.

Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

I haven’t used the service myself but some swear by it, especially people managing large or multiple social networks for clients.

Ping.fm supports one of the most comprehensive lists of social media of any platform [42 at press time]…We want to make sure that we don’t have unclear, ambiguous messaging across social media. With Ping.fm, we can more directly access the people who will respond to ur messages through the various networks it supports.

So if you are busy churning out content – like you should be – and have a vast social network, give Ping.fm a go round. It might make your life easier.

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