Since the beginning of time, or at least since businesses existed to make a profit, giveaways and raffles have been a popular way to generate new leads for your business.

GIVEAWAYS AND RAFFLES ARE A TIME HONORED TRADITION.

The greater the prize the more information your future customers are willing to give up for a chance to win. Dangle a small carrot and you can probably collect quite a few emails to grow your subscriber list with the hope that one day they will need your services or products. Increase the value of the prize, offer gift cards, latest technology, iPads, TVs, vacations and well, you will be able to collect names, addresses, birthdays and promises to name their unborn children after you and your business. Well, maybe not that last one, but you get the picture.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR ONLINE GIVEAWAY.

So you got the boss to approve your idea for a giveaway, or maybe you are the owner of this small business and you’ve tried many different strategies to drum up new leads and the time has come to try a basic giveaway. Uh-oh, now what. You are an expert on your business, not online technology to collect date and run a giveaway campaign. Do you really have to hire someone to program your giveaway? Do you have to pay for expensive software or plugins?

Rafflecopter is the solution! It literally only takes a few minutes to set up your giveway and no, you don’t have to do any coding at all. The best part is you can do a basic giveaway at no charge. You create the entry requirements from drop down menus and decide if they are optional or required. Assign weighted values to actions you consider more important. For example, following you on Twitter may get them 1 entry, but tweeting about your giveaway could earn them 2 or more entries. Premium features cost a little bit, but you can adjust your plan up or down as needed. This isn’t a monthly plan you get locked into. Need more features? Add a credit card and upgrade to run the souped up giveaway and then downgrade once it is over back to free. Once your giveaways parameters are set up it is as easy as copying and pasting the code into your website or blog. They even have an app to add to your Facebook page. Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below.