How a Giveaway and a Facebook Ad Boosted a Site

Published: Mon, 02/22/16

Wrapped up a 2 month long giveaway on our coloring book site that has been advertised on giveaway sites and via a Facebook ad. The Facebook post has almost 400k views (about 1/3 were natural views), 17k shares and 6k comments. Added 2000 people to a newsletter (those not interested in coloring books have dropped off and I have netted that 2000). Added 2000 people to a coloring dedicated group, 8000 likes on the Facebook page, haven't looked at the peripheral social media but did add significant numbers to Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram accounts that were all at zero at the beginning of the
giveaway.

Site was new and had Alexa ranking in the 12 million + and is now under 600,000. Over 1200 comments on multiple posts on the site. 20k entries.
What did I giveaway? Coloring books and pencils supplied by the authors. No gift cards, no cash.

I'm calling it a successful promotion. Costs totaled around $450 including all the advertising over the past 2 months. For newsletter subscribers alone that equals around .23 per subscriber that stuck around. Facebook ad was actually in the .02 per engagement range. Anytime you get active subscribers for under a buck total cost that is a good thing.

Learned some things I need to do differently, like I didn't know when people started commenting on the FB post and didn't get to engage on the thread until after several hundred comments had been made. Next time I'll know to start watching for comments immediately.

Now to replicate that on our other niche sites.

Granted the coloring book for grownups niche is easy to hit right now, but still.

Check out the results on http://coloringbookgoodies.com if you are interested in seeing the set up. The Rafflecopter portion isn't visible any longer but basically the entries were to like social media accounts (except Facebook, you can't require likes), pin the image to Pinterest, share on Twitter, comment on the blog post with a couple different options, and comment on a Facebook thread (that is allowed).

The post giveaway traffic will be ongoing for at least another week as I drip free PDF versions of coloring books to the threads on Facebook and out to the newsletter.

Hopefully you will be encouraged to think outside the box and create an engaging and interactive giveaway for your books and websites!