I got to thinking about giveaways just the other day as a possible way to save money on items I would want, need, or just to have for free. Obviously, the odds of winning any particular giveaway are rather small depending on the number of applicants but if you choose to scale the number of giveaways you enter it’s quite likely that you will win one or two here and there… and if you enter them regularly you’re almost assuredly going to win! Well, that’s the premise, anyway. 🙂
You might wonder if it’s even worth your time. After all, there can’t be that many giveaways going at any one time, can there? On the contrary, while individual bloggers may not offer giveaways very often it’s quite possible that the niche as a whole is regularly running giveaways. If we look at the survival and preparedness niche, for example, there are a handful of giveaways going on right now or, at least, as of Wednesday afternoon when I took this screenshot:
As you can see, there is a giveaway to win the All American Sun Oven at TheSurvivalMom.com, an All American Pressure Canner from FoodStorageAndSurvival.com, a book giveaway from BackdoorSurvival.com, survival audiobooks from InstinctSurvivalist.com, as well as a few irrelevant results for something from HerCampus.com and a few other sites including one YouTube video that my kids would be interested in. Further down the page and not shown in the screenshot above is a giveaway for a Boilerworks Backcountry Boiler Kettle that was originally found on BrianGreene.net but actually showed up in the search results on BeforeItsNews.com. The second page offered one additional interesting giveaway but nothing more.
I’d say 4 out of 10 desired results wasn’t too bad for a first effort. To get that I simply searched for “survival + giveaway” without the quotes on Google, then clicked on the “Search Tools” button and changed the first option from “Any time” to “Past week” in order to ONLY show results that have been posted within the past week rather than something from last month or last year.
That’s important to grasp because you certainly wouldn’t want to get excited about giveaways that are already over! Of course, if I wanted even more timely results I could have opted for “Past 24 hours” or even “Past hour” instead of “Past week” but that’s cutting it a bit too close, if you ask me. Choosing “Past week” seems to work out best.
Now, if I search for “preparedness + giveaway” I get some different results:
This time I also see an All American Pressure Canner but from PreparednessMama.com as well as the All American Sun Oven again but from MamaKautz.com. I also see some repeats of the above giveaways further down the page on other sites, as well as irrelevant results.
Ok, that’s not quite as good but I did notice different sites coming up in the results. It’s obvious to me that there are a few sites working together to promote the same giveaway. I can also see it makes a bit of a difference as to what keywords I’m searching on. In this case, “survival” is probably more useful than “preparedness” but you never know.
I then tried various advanced Google search operators, including “inurl:” “intitle:” and “allintitle:” but, sadly, didn’t get much better results. I even tried combinations of advanced searches such as “inurl:survival + intitle:giveaway” hoping that would work but strangely I got even worse results. 😉 Seems the best tactic is to just search for the words and select the right timeframe and let Google do the rest. In fact, I didn’t even need to search using “survival + giveaway” but could have just typed “survival giveaway” and got the same results.
I then wondered if I could find giveaways on Facebook because sometimes bloggers (who have Facebook pages) like to do giveaways there exclusively. To search for them I simply added this “site:Facebook.com” to my search query:
While the results looked promising, the only new giveaway I was able to find was a 6-quart Lodge Logic Dutch Oven from Homestead & Survival (it actually showed up twice in the results). Beyond that there were several useless results and a giveaway from The Survival Mom again. The second page wasn’t any better. Oh well. It was worth a try.
So I thought, rather than having to search for these terms, why not make my life easier and use Google Alerts? It’s really simple to setup:
Just type in what you want to search for, in this case “survival giveaway” and, though you could simply click the Create Alert button and be done with it, I choose to Show options:
As you can see there are several choices you can make. Personally, I choose to change How often field to “As-it-happens” meaning Google will email me immediately rather than “At most once a day” or “At most once a week.”
There are other selections that may be worth looking at, in particular, the Sources options which allow you to pick from the following: News, Blogs, Web, Video, Books, Discussions. Right now I left it at Automatic (or All sources) but it seems to me that it might be best to change this to Blogs and Web… maybe Discussions (or forums) is useful too. I wasn’t sure so I left it as is.
Notice there is no option for timeframe since Google will simply email you as soon as something happens which is a nice feature if you want to be among the first to know. We’ll have to see how it all goes over time.
As for signing up on a giveaway it’s usually incredibly simple: just enter your email and that’s it. Some bloggers want a comment, others offer incentives for sharing on social media but it’s all rather easy. The searching should take very little time at all but if you want to avoid doing even that the Google Alerts should make it essentially a cakewalk.
Remember that you don’t have to limit yourself to survival-related giveaways. Let you imagination wander and search for any and all giveaways that YOU might be interested in winning.
As for privacy, I’d suspect that nearly all bloggers will completely respect your privacy rights but if you’re wary you could always setup another email address that is specifically for giveaways (rather than your personal address) and then either check it regularly or have it forwarded to your personal email, which may be the best option of all.
What about you? Have you tried this strategy? Personally, I’m just starting so I’ll have to see how it goes but I’d be interested to hear your experiences or what you think about my idea. Thanks!
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