It’s long been known that giveaways can have a lot of benefits for your online business. Normally, when you think of doing a giveaway, products such as Gleam or Rafflecopter come to mind. These kinds of programs are generally pretty expensive, and you have to handle everything for the giveaway on your end from buying something to give away to shipping it out and even notifying the winners. Amazon actually has their own giveaway platform, and it can be a very powerful addition to your current marketing strategy.

Why Create A Giveaway On Amazon

There are actually several reasons you may want to consider doing an Amazon giveaway. First, you have the same benefit that you would have with any other giveaway, massive social exposure. Grow Your Audience With An Amazon GiveawayAmazon integrates with Twitter for social shares, and can really boost your exposure on Twitter. You can require people to follow you on Twitter in order to enter the giveaway, and use it to grow your following by hundreds or even thousands of users. Combine your giveaway with a paid tweet that targets your demographic, and you can really see your follow count skyrocket. If Twitter isn’t your style, you can also have your audience watch a YouTube video in order to enter. Sadly, because of Facebook’s current regulations, you can’t have visitors like your page, or share the giveaway on Facebook for entries, but you can still use an Amazon giveaway to boost your Facebook page likes. More on that a bit further below. Another reason for creating a giveaway on Amazon is to increase your email open rates. If you currently have an email list, you can inform them that you are going to be sending giveaways on occasion just to the members of your list. Then, offer them lower cost items, around $20 and only share the link to those on your email list. This will let your members have a better chance of winning, and once your audience starts seeing you doing random giveaways to your list, they’ll be much more inclined to read every email you sent their way. For you, this means higher email open rates, and a much more responsive audience. If you choose to go with this method, make certain you share your winners on your site as well as on your social media accounts. When people start seeing winners pop up, you can sit back and watch your email opt-in rates increase as well as your winning messages being shared on social networks.

How To Create An Amazon Giveaway

Get Started Creating An Amazon Giveaway Creating a giveaway is actually really easy on Amazon. Here’s a summary of the steps.
  1. Find an eligible item
  2. Click the button that says “Set up a giveaway.”
  3. Select the Number of prizes (i.e. how many units are you giving away)
  4. Select your giveaway type (Sweepstakes, Random Instant Win, Lucky Number Instant Win, First-come, First-served)
  5. Set up the requirement (follow on social, watch a video, answer a poll)
  6. Set the giveaway duration (1 to 7 days)
  7. Design the giveaway page
  8. Check out and purchase the item
  9. Done!
Once you click setup a giveaway, you will be taken to a screen to choose how many prizes you wish to award, what type of drawing you wish to have, and what people must do in order to enter the giveaway. If you’re an Amazon affiliate, this is where you can make a little bit of magic happen.

Making Money With Your Amazon Giveaway

One of the biggest reasons that you can see a lot of success with an Amazon giveaway is the fact that you can send people over to Amazon to check out the product that they can win. Even better, you can use an affiliate link to do this. Amazon Giveaway Setup Page How can you do this? Well, once you’re inside of the area to create a giveaway, you’ll see an area that you can add your own message that must be tweeted in order for people to enter. Here, you can create a short url using site stripe to link to the product that you’re giving away. Using text such as “This is our top pick: [Link], tweet this message to win one for free,” or another similar message. Then, when your giveaway message is retweeted, your affiliate link will be embedded in the message going out to the audiences of those who are retweeting. Now, this is a bit of a gray area as there really isn’t anything in place that prevents you from doing this, but Amazon may say in the future that this is something they don’t want to see.

Getting Your Audience To Other Platforms

Amazon Giveaway LogoWhile an Amazon giveaway does have great benefits with it, there are some downsides to using the platform. One major downside is the fact that you can’t get people to opt-in to your email list, or follow your business pages on Facebook. Well, with just a quick tweak, you actually can. The only clickable links in the giveaway messages are ones that actually link to Amazon, but you can still put urls into the messages that people can copy and paste into their browsers. If you’re wanting to build up your email list, or get people over to your Facebook page, then you can put a message in the area that non-winners see that says something like “Sorry you didn’t win this time, but we’re going to be doing another giveaway in a few days exclusively to people who follow us on Facebook. Go to [insert yourFacebook url] and follow the page so you can have another chance to win!” When people receive this message, they will then head over to your Facebook page and follow in order to get another opportunity to win later on. It helps you build your following, and gives value to your audience in the form of another chance to win the prize that they are interested in.

Final Thoughts on Creating Amazon Giveaways

As you can see, hosting an Amazon giveaway can be a really beneficial tool for your online business so long as you take the time to set it up the right way. Make certain that you are encouraging participants in your giveaway to follow you on other social channels, and take advantage of the ability to link to the product in the giveaway with affiliate links so that you can try to recoup some of your expenses. It’s really a win-win for all parties involved as it rewards your audience for engaging with you, helps to drive sales to Amazon, and helps you build a more responsive following on some of your social channels.

How To Create An Amazon Giveaway
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18 Comments

  1. Hello Jay – I am new to the amazon affiliate program and didn’t see anything in the help section on this (maybe I just didn’t use the right key words!), but instead I found your blog post. Thanks so much for sharing this info. I have been thinking about incorporating this into my marketing strategy. Question for you, as people click on your link, are they “coded” to you, so next time they make a purchase on amazon, its coded to you and you make a commission off that sale even if it wasn’t the initial product that was being offered in the giveaway? Just was curious. Thanks so much :) Happy Thanksgiving. :)

  2. Today I ran a giveaway on Amazon with one comic book in my series. All the copies were given away within the first 30 minutes of the drive. It was so amazing! I think it’s a great promotional idea, especially for authors of a series, as the winners may go back to Amazon and purchase the rest of the series. I posted there a book trailer/video and this way added some more viewers to my new channel. You pay a full price for your book, but I gave away Kindle books, which are priced reasonably. Also – you do get the royalty for your purchase. I’ll definitely do it again.

  3. While not being active on Amazon as an affiliate, I can say that the boosts you would receive, as long as taking the proper steps to ensure success, you will be able to capitalize on this free promotion, creating traffic, credibility, and opt-ins when done the way you brought out, as Lead Magnet Op-ins are the best thing to still focus on in the IM Game

  4. What a great article and a super helpful resource! Giveaways are such a great way to increase traffic and get more followers and it seems like Amazon can really make it easy to host one!

    I am definitely going to use this post to set up a giveaway myself! Thanks so much for sharing this information!

  5. I never knew that amazon had a giveaway platform, this is great news for me. I will definitely be implementing it as a new strategy in my online marketing and social media space. I’ve had quite a bit of difficulty in the past with low email open rates, this could be my game changer.
    Thanks Jay!

  6. This is an awesome opportunity Jay! I didn’t have a clue that this option existed. Sadly no FB, Pinterest or Instagram actions yet, but that will surely come in due time.

    What I am not completely clear on though is how the sending of the product would work. I see in your steps that you purchase the item, however will it then be sent to me or does Amazon mail out to the winner(s) with a link where they can fill out their details to get the product sent to them?

  7. Hey Jay, I have been looking into giveaways and I’m glad I found your post. I have never heard of Amazon Giveaways, I use Amazon Associates so of course I am going to look more into this.

    Does it matter how many times you have a giveaway? I mean do you have to have it scheduled or can you just do one when ever you have the funds to buy a new product?

    1. Hi Kenny,

      You can have as many giveaways as you want.
      I do recommend you start with one and track the results.

      From there, you can then set your own schedule for various giveaway contests. In fact, announcing a future giveaway to your subscribers may be a fantastic idea to get the attention of your readers.

  8. Hello Jay!
    Your post is stimulating… yet ANOTHER way to make money online! I’m still new at this and I’m getting a bit anxious because I have not had enough time to dedicate to my internet affiliate marketing business, as I believed I would when I started. I still have so much to learn and this information is very valuable. I am not clear about the cost of the give-away items…do Amazon affiliates get a discount for the items?

  9. Hi, Jay

    Thanks for the great info. I wasn’t aware that we could set up an Amazon Giveaway. This a very very interesting concept, which I really like :)

    It is simple to setup, intuitive and does not need much preparation. I’d definitely give it a try in the future, in order to boost my Twitter exposure.

    Thanks!

  10. I did not know it was possible to provide a giveaway through Amazon. As I am trying to grow my audience a giveaway would be very beneficial for me.
    Its good that you are still able to earn money from this. Is a giveaway something that I should be doing often or just something I do every once in a while?
    Thank you,

    1. I’d say give it a test and see how the results pan out. Once you have some analytics or data of the social growth from the giveaway, determine if it was worthwhile and decide to do it again.

  11. Jay,

    This is a new piece of info for me. I am learning every day in the affiliate marketing field especially looking at how my fellow mates are growing their business.

    This can be extended and applied to all the products one wishes to develop. Excellent tools at our disposal if only we know when and where to use them!

    Thanks for sharing.

  12. Thanks Jay, this really helps. You’ve given me so much to think about. I saved this post to my favorites.

    I will definitely be trying this out as soon as I plan for it. You covered all the bases so I don’t really have any questions. This is great! I hadn’t even thought of doing something like this before. Thanks for sharing.

    1. Hi Robert,

      Giveaways are a great way for your social growth and to extend the reach of your readership.
      If this is part of your wheelhouse, then I encourage you to give it a try.