Grow your audience with an Amazon Giveaway — How to

Amazon has a simple and low-cost way to grow your audience.

One of the lesser-known but more affordable ways to promote your business and grow your audience is to create an Amazon Giveaway.

An Amazon Giveaway is a sweepstakes in which you create the parameters and Amazon handles the winner selection and fulfillment. Here’s how to set one up.

1. Visit the product page on Amazon that you’d like to offer in your giveaway. You can select just regarding any product on Amazon. Then scroll down to the link to “Set up an Amazon Giveaway”:

This will bring you to a page in which you fill out the contest details. Here are the most notable elements:

Giveaway type: My suggestion is for Amazon to randomly select one entrant at the end of the seven day contest. Still, you can also choose: first x entrants win, every x entrants win, or random instant win.

Entry requirements: This is the point of creating the giveaway. Right now, you can ask entrants to:

• Follow you on twitter
• Tweet a message (that includes a link to the giveaway)
• Watch a video short or YouTube video
• Follow an author (great for authors with books on Amazon)
• Answer a poll

For example, let’s say I want to get more people that read DNW to follow me on twitter. I would create the giveaway and require that people follow me on twitter in order to be entered to win.

Discoverability: This is one of the most notable decisions you’ll make. You can decide to keep your giveaway private or make it public on Amazon’s site.

If you want to just get a lot of numbers even if they are low quality, then choose to make it public. You’ll get a lot of people to follow you on twitter or watch your video.

Still, if you want quality, you might want to make it private. In my DNW example, I’d make it private and post regarding it on the site. Then anyone who saw the message on my site could enter the contest if they followed me on twitter, but I wouldn’t get a lot of random sweeptakes junkies following just to have a chance to win.

The decision to make it private/public depends a lot on your goals and your audience.

Here are some ways you can use Amazon Giveaways:

• Make people watch a short video regarding your product/service
• Get people to tweet a message promoting your firm (note: it will be labeled #giveaway with a link to the giveaway)
• Promote a product or book you created
• Answer a poll question

See these right now-running contests to get some inspiration.