Recently I hosted a giveaway here on the blog with the sweet Sarah of Polkadot & Stripes. It was wildly successful. Why? Part of the reason was the wonderful goodies up for grabs, but I think what made it so successful was my choice of giveaway platform.

I tried out PunchTab, which I found to be super easy (and free!) to set up, and even easier for my readers to enter. You can upgrade on the site by paying a fee, but I found my basic account to be more than adequate.

There are a number of other platforms out there which offer a similar service (such as Rafflecopter and Wildfire). I haven'r tried out these two platforms, but from the research I did, PunchTab seems to have impressed a lot of people. 

Unlike the traditional method of people commenting on your blog post to enter, with PunchTab, users have a variety of methods with which to enter. The more ways they enter, the more entries they get. You get to customize exaclty what you would like your readers to do (tweet about the giveaway, answer a question, like you on facebook etc). And the best part, you don't have to manually count and enter each entry into another server like RandomOrg to choose a winner. As soon as the giveaway is over, with the click of one button, PunchTab automatically picks a random winner. Its so easy! You can also choose to download a list of emails that your readers used to enter your giveaway to add to your monthly newsletter or to send out thank you emails etc. 

Here are some stats I thought would be worth mentioning about the giveaway I ran a little while ago:

For my little blog, my readers churned out a total of 631 entries. Ok, the total number of people who entered was 112 but that means that they each must have entered at least 2 or 3 times. The reason they were able to was because I made it easy for them. 

There's nothing more frustrating than a complicated list of instructions for entering a giveaway. Help your readers out and make it easy for them. And save yourself a lot of time in tallying up all the entries too!

Have you tried PunchTab before? Can you recommend any other platforms that have worked well for you in the past? Drop me a line below, I'd love to hear from you!