How To Protect Your Product Review and Giveaway Blog From Cheaters
If you own a product review and giveaway blog you need to protect your site, your professional reputation and your readers from those who cheat at mommy blog giveaways. What do I mean you might be thinking to yourself? Well…as an owner of a review and giveaway site, I can tell you for a fact that you will encounter people who want to cheat while trying to win the products you are giving away.
Over the past year I have learned a lot about running my site and how ‘cheaters’ try to sneak in and win the products. With that said, I am going to share with you some important tips that you need to know if you are a product review blogger.
Most cheaters will ride in during the last 72 hours of the giveaway to submit their entries and they do this because they ‘think’ you won’t check out their entry submissions because it is getting close to ending and it’s also more busier during the end of the promotion. With that said, here is what you need to be looking at when validating their entries.
1. Did they answer the mandatory entry? A lot of these “cheaters” don’t answer it at all or they just copy the first answer they see above them in the comment field. They rarely visit the sponsor’s site which is the objective of having a mandatory entry. It is very important that you make sure that every winner has completed the mandatory entry and just don’t assume that they did. Assuming that they did only hurts those who legitimately play by the rules.
2. If the person’s winning entry states that it was a Tweet you need to validate that Tweet and make sure it was ‘their’ tweet and not someone else who entered. Furthermore, make sure it was Tweeted on the day and time it states that it was placed. I have personally found entries where people hijacked other people’s Tweets to use as their own. In addition, I have also found where they use the same exact Tweet from day one…for the entire length of the giveaway and never re-tweeted it at all.
3. If you require all of the people to follow your blog using Google Friend Connect to be eligible to win your giveaways, you need to take the time to check that out. Many times I have found folks saying they are following our site when in fact…they are not.
4. If it is a big hot product giveaway…some people will use multiple accounts to enter that particular contest. This is a lot harder to spot but if you are observant, you can catch them! I once had someone use the name Jessica4me, Jessica4you and Jessica4kids enter one of my giveaways. I was able to easily spot it was the same person by the type of user name they were using…plus, they were not smart enough to use different email addresses! I promptly disqualified all of her user names.
It is very important that we protect our professional reputations and protect those who enter our giveaways and follow the rules from those who cheat. Furthermore, the companies we represent expect us to run a professional giveaway for them. Those companies don’t want cheaters winning either. Take the time out of your busy day and verify all winner’s entries before confirming them as the winner and by doing so…you garner the trust of those who participate and sponsor the giveaways on your blog.
This article was written by Shelly Hill, copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved. This article is the property of the Two Classy Chics Blog.