Top 5 WordPress Plugins To Run Contests & Sweepstakes On Your Blog

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WordPress Plugins To Run Contests
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Want to make your website more popular? Or want to increase the size of your email list?

If you said yes to any of these, you should seriously consider running a contest or sweepstake in your website. Along with making your site more popular and increasing your email list, you will also get more followers, more attention and an increased reach.

Okay, you are convinced now. You want to start a content in your site. But how would you do that?

Running a contest or sweepstake could not be done just by publishing a post like this –

‘Hey people, here’s a contest/sweepstake for you. Come join the contest…’

No, these things don’t work this way. In order to make the most out of your contest/sweepstake, you need to set up the ground rules, set a time limit, promote the event and finally, choose the winners in a proper way.

That sounds like a lot of work, right? Luckily, you can take care of most of these things by using a dedicated WordPress plugin. There are some excellent, free plugins for creating contests, sweepstakes or giveaways.

Best WordPress contest plugins to boost your readership

In today’s post, I will introduce you to the 5 best WordPress plugins to run contest and sweepstakes on your blog. Let’s see which they are, shall we?

  1. Gleam
  2. Social Contests
  3. ContestFriend for WordPress
  4. Pick Giveaway Winner
  5. WordPress InviteBox Plugin

Let us now take a detailed look into each of the above.

1. Gleam

Gleam is the most neatest solution for a blogger & a Webmaster to run a contest on their blog. Even though this solution doesn’t come with a plugin & everything needs to be done from Gleam interface, the features make it the most obvious choice for running a giveaway on your blog.

Gleam let’s you collect email & you can ask users to take any action of your choice. That could be follow a profile on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or any other. You can also make users download your smartphone app which is one unique feature.

Glaem participation option
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You can directly pick the winner & announce it from the dashboard itself. They have three plans & you can start with the pro competition plan which is my favorite.

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2. Social Contests

Social Contests
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Social Contests is another great WordPress plugin for creating various promotional campaigns including sweepstakes, vote contest, photo contest, essay contest, referral promotion etc. In order to use any campaign, you need to purchase a Wishpond plan.

There is a 14 day trial available. The plugin comes with lots of readymade templates for the contest and sweepstakes. It is possible to edit the templates or create your own templates.

You can also promote the campaigns in your Facebook and Twitter pages. By using the plugin, you will have specially developed entry pages for mobile devices. Wishpond will also save the participants data including email address, name, age, gender and location, which could be downloaded anytime. The WP e-commerce compatible plugin is available in 35 languages.

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3. ContestFriend For WordPress

ContestFriend for WordPress
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ContestFriend for WordPress provides a simple way to add intuitive contests or sweepstakes in your website. The tinyMCE editor of the contest description field allows basic HTML tags. Therefore, you can easily add some markup to your text to focus on the main points. You can also add a separate disclaimer link.

The design section lets you control the appearance of the event. Besides choosing the width, you can customize the background, description and headline text, color etc. You can choose to allow the participants to share the contests in social media platforms and increase their chances of winning.

It is also possible to limit the number of winners and the entries per referral. The live preview feature will help you to fine tune your events before displaying them in your website. You can activate or deactivate any event from the dashboard.

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4. Pick Giveaway Winner

Pick Giveaway Winner
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If you want to run a giveaway or sweepstake in your WordPress site, Pick Giveaway Winner should be one of your top choices. This plugin automatically selects a winner from the comments of a specific post. By using the RAND() function of MySQL, the plugin will randomly select a winner for you.

Using the plugin is very simple. Once you have installed and activated it in your WordPress site, a new sub-menu titled ‘Pick Giveaway Winner’ will be created under the ‘Tools’ menu.

Go to Tools > Pick Giveaway Winner to use the plugin. On that page, you will find a drop-down list of all the posts of your WordPress site. Select the post from which you want to choose the winner. It is possible to have more than 1 winner for your events.

If you don’t allow multiple entries, you can disqualify them entirely or choose to keep a single entry from the participant.

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5. WordPress InviteBox Plugin

WordPress InviteBox Plugin
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This is a unique plugin for creating social referral programs powered by InviteBox. In order to use the plugin, you will need an InviteBox account, which has a tree trial available.

Referral programs are very powerful for attracting more users and/or customers for your website or company. Dropbox enjoyed a 60% increase in their signup after introducing referral programs with incentives.

By using the plugin, you can provide various incentives including giving instant reward, goal-based rewards, referral contest, giveaways, sweepstakes etc. WordPress InviteBox allows you to set custom rules for the contests. You can also display the top referrer’s leaderboard to increase competition among the participants.

For the sweepstakes and giveaways, the plugin will automatically monitor the participant activities and provide entries according to the pre-fixed parameters.

Learn More/Download

What’s Your Choice?

If you are trying to build up an audience quickly, or want to do some promotions for your websites, creating a contest or sweepstake could be an excellent idea. And the plugins mentioned above are the necessary tools you will need for creating such events.

Recommended resources for WordPress:

Now that you have gone through the list of the 5 best WordPress plugins to run contest and sweepstakes on your blog, which one looks most interesting to you? Let me know in the comments. And if you have any tips about creating contests and/or sweepstakes, feel free to share with us.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

11 thoughts on “Top 5 WordPress Plugins To Run Contests & Sweepstakes On Your Blog”

  1. Bobby

    I am thinking to hold a Free giveaway for my readers this diwali. But I have not done this before.
    Which Plugin I should go for?

  2. Alex

    Hello. Do you know some solution for my scenario? Basically it’s like the system with random codes printed on products, a user should input his code(s) into a form on the website and that code should be validated against a predefined list of codes stored “in the back”. I couldn’t find a plugin that does this yet…

  3. Peter Rowland

    Thanks Harsh. I have just started looking for a sweepstake plugin to run charity raffles from my site. I have read a lot of reviews and posts about the various plugins, but found yours to be very informative indeed. As the profits of the raffles will be going to a charity organisation, I am looking for the lowest cost option available to maximise our donation. I will be trying ContestFriend, based on your review. Thank You

  4. james

    Thanks for sharing. I have also launched a content/competition/prizedraw plugin for WordPress called No Frills Prize Draw.

    Customise your competition to suit your needs. View your entries (in table format or as a CSV download) and pick a winner with ease. Once your competition is over simply clear the data and start again.

    The theme is stripped back and every field is presented with a unique class name, giving you the ability to style your competition the way you want to.

    Features include:

    -Prize draws as text-based answers OR multiple choice entry
    -Set up optional prize draws with OR without a question to answer
    -Set up a registration check (optional)
    -Set up Terms and conditions (optional)
    -View entries as table or CSV download
    -Automated OR manual winner selected (depending on set up)
    -Incredibly quick and simple to set up, using a shortcode to print the entry page anywhere on your website

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/no-frills-prize-draw/

    There is also a PRO version with loads more features including multiple prize draws, social sharing, additional fields, start/end dates, multilingual support etc.

    http://www.jamestibbles.co.uk/no-frills-prize-draw-pro/

    1. jtibbles

      FYI the plugin has been updated and improved now.
      Additional features include extra custom fields, the ability to pick multiple winners, to include/exclude entrants and to pick winners multiple times.

  5. Harley

    Nice list. I’ve used Rafflecopter in the past with great results. Very customizable. Not too thrilled about the price though. You really need the Premium version to unlock all of the features. Unfortunately, that option costs $89 per month!

  6. Hasanali

    Thanks for sharing wonderful & informative post. I already use invite box plugin which is very nice. Also I definitely use other plugins that you mentioned.

  7. Kyle Stewart

    This is a really good post, I’ll have to give Social Contests a go. It seems like it’s exactly what I was looking for Thanks!

  8. Nikhil

    Hi Harsh,

    I am hearing first time about these plugins. I was wondered how people are creating those lucrative pages and organizing the giveaways. I want to ask you one thing. Are they free to use or we have to pay something to use them on our blogs?

    Thanks for this wonderful post bro. Have a great week ahead.

    -Nikhil

  9. Luke Wright

    Thanks Harsh for this post. You have written a nice pot. ContestHopper is so good. It is simplest WordPress plugin. I have used this. Really all those plugin are so good. Thanks for this great article share with us.

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