The Problem With Giveaways

The Problem With Giveaways | brokeGIRLrich

I have a confession to make.

I kind of love sorting through and entering low entry giveaways.

There used to be this great site (Tightwad in Utah), where they were compiled regularly, but the site owner stopped amassing the low entry giveaways and now it’s become a lot more of a project.

I mean, there are certainly worse time killing hobbies to have.

I’ve never won anything really exciting but I did once win one of those giveaways where a few bloggers come together to make like a super package giveaway and it was a fairly weird and amusing pile of stuff that kept showing up on my doorstep for about a month including:

A Basket of Olbas natural products
A coloring book and pencil set
A strange necklace
A slap watch

And like half a dozen other things I don’t even remember.

While I’m not quite ready to give up the giveaway scrolling when I’m bored, there are a few things to giveaways that I don’t really love (which I acknowledge is a little hypocritical, cause I’m also running my own giveaway this month – check out the Rafflecopter at the bottom of the post).

Pimping Out Your Social Media

Now, the single Twitter post about a giveaway, I don’t mind much, but signing up to follow folks I don’t really care about across all forms of social media, especially Facebook, isn’t really my favorite thing.

There are plenty of giveaways you can enter that don’t involve doing this, but the vast majority do and you often don’t know until you’re on the site and now you’ve read all about this thing and you’re kind of excited and so you just click the button and the next thing you know your entire Facebook feed is full of bloggers you don’t care about.

Cluttering Your Inbox

Smart folks create a separate email address for sign ups.

I’m not always smart.

I’m enrolled in so many weird blogger digests, my personal email is crying. I think if my Gmail could reach through the computer and smack my hands when it sees my typing in “low entry giveaways” to Google, it would.

I use Unroll me pretty regularly, but it has a max limit on the free version and it doesn’t always work.

If you’re going to giveaway binge, be smart and set up a separate email account just for that.

Accidentally Enrolling In Things

So this is the event that spurred this whole post. I entered a Good Housekeeping giveaway and in the tiny, fine print I didn’t see, it enrolled me in a Good Housekeeping subscription.

It took me a month to get Good Housekeeping off my back and get that subscription cancelled.

And, surprise, I didn’t win the trip to the Caribbean, so that was just a total waste of time.

If these things haven’t detracted you, some of the best ways to win giveaways is to stick to the low entry ones. Not surprisingly, a lot of those prizes are things you generally wouldn’t want, but sometimes you find some interesting gems among them.