What’s the easiest way to kickstart your giveaway, contest or sweepstakes?

It’s to submit it to each one of these giveaways submissions sites. This list of giveaway promotion websites includes directories, forums, and communities that all partake in giveaways, contests, and sweepstakes.

NB. We have updated this guide to include more tips on promoting your giveaway. Scroll further down past the list of giveaway promotion sites to find our updated giveaway promotion guide.

Please remember, contest directory sites like the ones will below do tend to consist of lower quality traffic, but it’s fantastic for building momentum and your initial viral shares. If you are selling a more general product some of these people will still convert and more than likely introduce your brand to new customers who definitely will.

If your company sells a more niche product, it’s better to advertise your contest in places where your audience hangs out. This includes Facebook groups, niche forums, partners/affiliates, and paid advertising.

Make sure you’re using the VYPER contest building platform to take full advantage of this list. It helps you maintain a high quality of leads while still fully leveraging the virality of social and referral marketing.

Giveaway Promotion Sites

• 1sweepstakes.com
• bloggiveawaydirectory.com/list-your-giveaway-for-free/
• contestchest.com/list-a-contest
• contests.about.com
• contestwatchers.com/submit-contest/
• doubleprizes.com/contests/new?utf8=%E2%9C%93&submit=
• enteronlinesweeps.com/submit-a-sweeps/
• giveawaybase.com
• giveawayfrenzy.com/giveaway-submit/
• giveawayhunt.com
• giveawayjunkie.com/submit_your_giveaway.php
• giveawaymonkey.blogspot.com/p/submit-listing.html
• ilikepromos.com/
• international-giveaways.blogspot.com/p/submit-your-giveaway.html
• juliesfreebies.com/list-your-giveaway/
• justsweep.com/submit-a-giveaway/
• makobiscribe.com/for-the-blogger/places-to-submit-your-giveaways/
• slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=25
• sweepstakesmax.com/Add-Sweepstakes
• sweeptight.com/submit-a-sweepstakes
• sweetiessecretsweeps.com/submitsweeps/
• sweetiessweeps.com/submit-a-sweeps
• 5minutesformom.com/giveaways/
• anyluckyday.com/submit-giveaway
• bigsweeps.com
• bloggiveawaydirectory.com/submit-a-giveaway/
• contest-corner.com/submit-a-giveaway/
• contestbee.com
• contestbee.com/submit/
• contestcanada.net
• contestcanada.net/add-contest/
• contestchest.com
• contestformoms.com/submit-your-contest/
• contestgirl.com
• contestgirl.com/add-sweepstakes.pl
• contestheat.com
• contesthound.com
• contesthound.com/advertise-sweepstakes-or-contests/
• contestlisting.com/submit/
• doubleprizes.com
• emperola.com
• emperola.com/submit-contest
• enzasbargains.com
• fforfree.net/p/submit-your-contests.html
• freecenter.com/db/add.cgi?type=contest
• giveawaycube.com/page?id=3
• giveawayfrenzy.com
• giveawayjunkie.com
• giveawaymonkey.com
• giveawaypromote.com
• giveawaypromote.com/submit-giveaway/
• giveawayroute.com/p/submit-giveaway.html
• giveawayscoop.com/add/
• giveawayscout.com/addblog/
• giveawaysnews.com
• hypersweep.com
• hypersweep.com/submit/submit.cfm
• ilovegiveaways.com
• ilovegiveaways.com/submit-giveaway
• infinitesweeps.com
• infinitesweeps.com/submit/
• international-giveaways.blogspot.com
• internationalgiveaways.com
• justsweep.com
• luckycontests.com
• luckycontests.com/contactonline-sweepstakes.com/addasweep/
• mysavings.com
• online-sweepstakes.com
• ozbargain.com.au/node/add/competition
• prizeatron.com/2007/01/how-to-submit-your-contest.html
• reddit.com/r/sweepstakes/submit
• sandysrealm.com/add-a-sweep/
• sharkki.com
• shoppingbookmarks.com
• simplystacie.net/2010/03/sites-to-list-your-giveaways/
• super-sweeps.com/submitsweep.php
• sweepsadvantage.com
• sweepstakes-search.com
• sweepstakes-search.com/add-sweepstakes.html
• sweepstakes.bz/addasweeps.asp
• sweepstakesbible.com
• sweepstakesbug.com
• sweepstakesbug.com/submit/
• sweepstakescrazy.com/submit-sweeps.htm
• sweepstakesfanatics.com
• sweepstakesfrenzy.com
• sweepstakeslovers.com
• sweepstakeslovers.com/suggest-a-sweepstakes/
• sweepstakesmag.com
• sweepstakesmania.com/addasweep
• sweepstakesmax.com
• sweetiessweeps.com
• thefreesite.com/submit/
• theprizefinder.com
• theprizefinder.com/upload-competitions
• tightwadinutah.com/p/submit-low-entry-giveaway.html
• totallyfreestuff.com/submit.asp?m=13
• usacontestsonline.com/add-a-contest/
• weusecoupons.com/upload/enter-my-blog-contest/
• win-free-stuff.ca/add-a-contest
• win.ly
• winasweepstakes.com
• winasweepstakes.com/submit-sweepstakes

Promoting Your Giveaway Online

Submitting your giveaway to giveaway promotion sites helps a lot and is a great place to start. However, we recommend that you promote your giveaway across various marketing channels.

The more effort you put into promoting your giveaway, the higher the chances are of a successful campaign.

Here’s a list of strategies to promote your giveaway:

• Giveaway landing page
• Send out emails
• Share on socials
• Paid ads
• Brand collabs
• Referral marketing
• Get featured on blogs, podcasts, videos, etc.

Let’s take a closer look at these giveaway promotion strategies and how they can benefit your campaign.

Giveaway Landing Page

A dedicated landing page for your giveaway is crucial and highly recommended. It’s one location for everything related to the giveaway.

Giveaway landing page benefits include:

• A place to display the prize and its features
• A customizable landing page that can feature links to your site and product pages. This is an excellent opportunity to use the giveaway to drive traffic to your website and create brand exposure.
• Users can easily submit their email to enter the giveaway.
• Sharing the giveaway landing page on socials can instantly drive traffic from the social platform to your giveaway.

A giveaway landing page isn’t mandatory. However, it is essential if you run an online business. Hosting the giveaway landing page on your site will drive plenty of traffic from external sources to your site.

Another effective way to drive traffic to your giveaway is with email marketing.

Email Marketing

If you already have an email list, it’s a no-brainer to send an email announcing your giveaway. People on your email list are already familiar with your brand and will certainly engage with an email that features your giveaway.

Here are tips for sending out giveaway emails:

• Send out an initial launch email to announce the giveaway.
• Reminder emails during the giveaway are essential. These boost engagement and will potentially create more entrants.
• Ask users from your current email list to refer friends to your giveaway. This can help spread the news of your giveaway faster. However, you will need to offer something back in return for a referral (e.g. discounts, free gifts, or bonus entries to the giveaway).

Click here for Giveaway Email Templates that will help you get started sending out emails to launch your giveaway.

Social Media

Giveaways are popular on social media and are considered viral content. Users who enter social media giveaways have no issues with engaging with a social media post (like, share, save, and comment).

Some tips on promoting a giveaway on social media:

• Create posts to tease the giveaway ahead of its launch. This can help create a buzz around the campaign and ensure a successful launch. Many anxiously awaited users will be well prepared to enter on launch day.
• You can use tools like Planoly to organize content and schedule posts in advance for maximum visibility. 
• Create an image that instantly captures attention and has an effective call to action. Giveaway videos are increasingly becoming more popular. We highly recommend creating a video just for your campaign if it is within your budget or means.
• Ask creators or influencers with larger audiences (than you) on the platform to share your giveaway with their audience.
• Ask users to comment and tag other users. This action creates engagement for the giveaway post, making it more discoverable. Tagging another user will refer that user to the giveaway.

Ridge created the perfect video to promote their massive giveaway. The video is professional, humorous, and informative.

Click Here to learn more about The Ridge Wallet Giveaway and the video they created to promote the campaign.

Paid Ads

Paid ads can quickly boost your giveaway’s visibility. This boost is ideal early on in the campaign as it can push the giveaway towards virality.

For example, host a referral Instagram giveaway in which entrants are encouraged to refer people to enter. Pay for an Instagram ad that will drive traffic to your Instagram giveaway post.

The traffic from the giveaway will be the initial wave of engagement and entries. The engagement will make the giveaway post go viral, creating more exposure. And the entrants from the ad will potentially refer more people to the giveaway.

It’s always a good option to pay for traffic to your giveaway rather than manually promoting it and seeking organic traffic. Giveaways are short, which is why traffic is needed quickly in the early stages of the campaign.

Brand Collabs

Collaborating with other brands can seriously improve your giveaway promotional Efforts. Consider collaborating with a brand that may complement your brand. For, a camera manufacturer like Canon can collaborate with a brand that manufactures camera bags or tripods.

Canon can host a camera giveaway where the prices include camera bags and tripods. To enter this giveaway, users must submit their email addresses to all three brands. This is one giveaway that provides leads to three brands.

Now, this is the interesting part. The three brands can each market the giveaway on their own channels, gaining exposure to each other’s audience. This also means that three separate entities will be marketing one giveaway—one giveaway with three times the promotional effort.

If you already have a relationship with another brand within your industry, you could partner with that brand to host and promote your giveaway.

Referral Marketing

We have already mentioned referral giveaways. Referral marketing is a potent tool for building viral campaigns that create massive exposure and leads for your brand. Leads will refer new leads, and the new leads will refer more leads. This is the recipe for exponential growth.

You can use this recipe in your giveaway by encouraging entrants to refer more people to it. This will increase the number of users referred, and those referred users will refer more users, creating an exponential increase in giveaway entries.

Get Featured!

Don’t be restricted to your audience and your marketing channels. Get featured on other brands’ marketing channels and get discovered by their audience.

You can achieve this by:

• Appearing as a guest on a podcast
• Writing a guest post on a blog
• Appearing in an influencer video

You can go the traditional route and get featured in newspapers, magazines, and radio. If you know the platform your demographic uses, then strive to market your brand and giveaway there.

For example, Kevin Smith is promoting his next movie, The 4:30 Movie. Due to his popularity in podcasting, Kevin got himself featured on top-tier podcast episodes by Theo Von and Steve-O.

This strategy allowed Kevin to reach a larger audience (on the podcasting platform) and inform them about his new movie.

Appearing on popular podcasts, blogs, etc. is a common strategy used today to promote brands, products, and more. Its very effective and worth looking into if you have the means to do so.

Let us know if you have any other giveaway promotion sites you think should be added to the list.

Once your contest is up and running, make sure you are levering all these new entrants to share your brand, engage with your content and also tag their friends.

A few contest/giveaway “Bonus Actions” (the task that an entrant does to get awarded extra points) that we see our most successful users consistently using are.

• Share this Facebook post about the contest
• Tag 3 friends in this Instagram post about the contest
• Post the image of our giveaway to your Instagram and tag us
• Join our Facebook group
• get $10 off for joining our Facebook Messenger Bot

So make sure you are leveraging these entrants as much as possible.

Even though the people on these contest submission websites are looking mostly for contests to enter, it does not mean they will not be interested in your product in a few weeks, or months.

It’s all about setting up the proper remarketing funnels.

Setup email drips, Facebook and Google ad remarketing campaigns. Also, keep the organic content flowing on 2 or 3 of your strongest channels.

So start working your way through the list of giveaway promotion sites and see how you go.

Good luck and all the best with your contest!