Personalizing your blog giveaways (and a $100 Amazon giveaway)

Running giveaways on blogs is extremely popular as a way to engage your audience as well as build out your following externally, whether on social media or through your email newsletters. All bloggers approach this type of content in different formats (with no format being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’). Depending on your blog’s voice and tone, approaching a giveaway from a personal point of view and describing your experience with the product can be a very compelling way to engage your readership and integrate reviews of the product without simply listing out features and facts about it. Recipe Girl is an exemplary example of this type of personalization.

Recipe Girl is a blog written by Lori Lange that contains over 2,600 different recipes. Her blog is extremely popular with 25k+ Twitter followers, 51k+ Facebook fans and over 138,000 Pinterest followers! She has also written a cookbook (The Recipe Girl Cookbook) which is available on Amazon.com.

When giveaways are posted on Recipe Girl they are tighly integrated with the content being written about and are presented in the first person, describing Lori’s experience with the product. Recently Recipe Girl ran a giveaway for All the Good Cookies Cookbook by Gretchen Holt- Witt. This giveaway was included within an article about Lori’s experience using one of the recipes from the cookbook to make Chocolate Chip- Toffee Strip Cookies. Because of the language used to describe the content of the book, photos that were included to show her final product (rather than stock images or those provided by a brand) and the inclusion of the recipe that was used, the content of the giveaway and the article are perfectly matched.

Not every giveaway is as niche as the All the Good Cookies Cookbook. Lori also ran a giveaway for a Whole Foods gift card. This can be a rather generic prize, depending on how it is presented but it is also a giveaway that will interest a very wide variety of potential entrants. Instead of simply posting the giveaway to gain fans, followers, etc. Lori went into detail about why she shops at Whole Foods (down to her experience buying chicken thighs there). In another giveaway for Albion Fit, Lori describes which articles of clothing she prefers from the company and why that is. This level of personal detail makes the content fit the level of personalization that all of her posts achieve.

Not every blog or article must be written on a such a personal level, but Recipe Girl’s blog is written as an ongoing conversation with her audience. She manages to merge her giveaways into her content in such as way that readers will enjoy the article and topics being written about. This means they are not visiting just for the giveaway but will more likely to engage with optional entries such as following her on Twitter or subscribing to her newsletter.

This level of personalization not only interests the blog’s readers in the content written by the blogger but can often also seen as a more trustworthy review. Because the readers know that Lori used the product and recommends it they can be more willing to visit the brand’s website and check that out too. This creates a situation in which everyone, the blogger, reader and brand, are achieving what they set out to do.

Enter our giveaway, with which we’ve partnered with Recipe Girl, for a chance to win $100 Amazon.com Gift Card to update your recipebook collection (or buy whatever you want!) and be sure to check out the list of her 10 favorite cookbooks of all time.