Looking for a way to grow fast on Instagram? If so, giveaways and contests might be your answer, and the proof is in the numbers! Instagram accounts that run contests and giveaways grow 70% faster than those who don’t.
If that wasn’t impressive enough, Instagram posts that are focused around contests earn nearly 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes compared to regular posts.
Yet, only 2% of Instagram accounts run contests or giveaways and less than 1% of all Instagram posts are contests. That means your brand has a good chance to stand out by using this underutilized content strategy.
So in this post, I’ll walk through 3 simple steps to create an Instagram giveaway or contest idea that fast tracks the growth of your Instagram account.
By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly how to run your contest or giveaway for maximum engagement.
Ready to dive-in? Let’s get started!
How to Create Instagram Giveaways and Contest
1. Set your Goals
A great Instagram giveaway aligns with your goal for the contest. Thus, confirming your goal for the promotion is your first step.
Here are a few common goals for Instagram contests and giveaways:
Engagement – Followers, comments, and likes
Media Assets – User generated content such as customer photos, videos, or testimonials
Sales Driven – Traffic to your site that leads to email signups, registrations and purchases
An understanding of what exactly you’re after will help you to choose the right contest or giveaway idea and help you track the KPIs so you can measure the success of the campaign.
2. Choose the Prize
Once you choose your goal, the second step is to choose a great prize for the contest or giveaway.
Note that what you actually give away is less important than making sure that:
the prize actually attracts your ideal customer
is related to your products or services
Imagine you own a yoga studio – your ideal customer would be those that are yoga enthusiasts and Yoga beginners. What would be a good prize? An iTunes gift card? Not likely. An iPhone? Maybe, but it’s not related to your services. How about a yoga kit that includes a yoga mat, yoga pants, and free yoga session. Bingo!
3. Pick the Best Instagram Giveaway and Contest Type
The third step is to pick from proven giveaway and contest ideas. Here are 4 popular types to choose from:
A. Like This Post Contest
Here you have participants like your post and you choose a winner out of your likes. This type of contest is most commonly used and for good reason: The barrier for entry is low, meaning higher chances of participation, and administrative work such as finding a winner is easy on the business.
B. Photo/Video Contest
This type of contest is great for businesses looking to gather user generated content. Here you have participants upload a photo with your product to their feed win. This is also great for brand awareness as users’ own followers see the post. Typically, you’d want to have participants use a hashtag that you create or have them tag your business so you can easily find participants.
C. Caption This Contest
This contest type asks participants to comment on your posts and the most creative will win. This is a great contest type to boost engagement and build brand loyalty as participants put effort towards a witty or creative line for community bragging rights and a prize.
D. Follow To Win Contest
This contest type is great to boost your follower count. The downside is that it does not engage your current followers. To help with this, you could combine this contest type with another and make it known that they must also be following your brand to be eligible.
Those four contest and giveaway types are more than enough to get started with. But there is one more thing that must be shared.
Promotional Guidelines
While this might not be the sexiest part of an Instagram contest, I do have to walk you through the Instagram Promotion Guidelines so you don’t jeopardize your account. There are 5 things to know when we think of Instagram’s promotional guidelines:
The first is to make sure you follow the law. This is true as it relates to your official rules, offer terms and eligibility requirements. For example, restrictions on age or residency, the actual promotion of your giveaway or contest, and all prizes offered.
The second promotional guideline to be aware of is that you must not encourage people to inaccurately tag photos. An example being a post they are not in, nor inaccurately tag photos yourself.
The third guideline to follow is that your promotion must include a complete release of Instagram by each entrant or participant and your post must have acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram.
The fourth guideline states that Instagram will not help you with your contest in any capacity including the administration of your promotion or choosing a winner.
And lastly, the fifth guideline to follow is the acknowledgement that if you use Instagram for your promotions, that you do so at your own risk.
Quick Recap
Well there you have it, the 3-step process to great Instagram giveaway and contest ideas.
As a recap, step 1 is to confirm your goal for the promotion. Common goals include: engagement, media assets, and sales.
Step 2 is to choose a great prize for the contest or giveaway. A great prize attracts your ideal customer and is related to your products or services.
Step 3 is to pick from proven giveaway and contest ideas. The 4 most common contest types are: Like This Post Contest, Photo/Video Contest, Caption This Contest, and the Follow To Win Contest
And last, we made it clear to follow Instagram’s promotion guidelines.
Instagram giveaways and contests are indeed great ways to effectively boost your brand awareness and followers. But if it is conversions you want to increase, then consider hiring social media experts.
These are 21 practical tips that you can implement that should, move the needle on your organic traffic. Many of them that I have used myself in my own SEO strategies. I have managed to compile four categories: increasing clicks, content/on-page SEO tips, technical SEO, and a little bit of link building. There are 21 of these and are as:
Increasing Clicks
Let’s start with clicks, specifically earning more clicks from Google without actually ranking higher, because that’s one of the great things about SEO. You don’t actually have to rank higher to get more traffic if you can get more clicks from the rankings that you already have. So let’s talk about some specific strategies for getting more clicks without increasing rankings.
1. Favicon Optimization
Now I’m surprised more people haven’t talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they’re high contrast, if they’re visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right. Aaron Wall, SEO Book, wrote one of the very few posts about that.
2. Breadcrumb Optimization
While we’re optimizing our favicons, let’s take a look at breadcrumb optimization. Google displays breadcrumbs in both desktop and mobile search results. They can be keyword-rich breadcrumbs, which can influence your click-through rate. Now Google gets their breadcrumbs from a lot of places. That can be your URL, your schema markup, your actual breadcrumbs on the page.
What you want to do is make sure Google is displaying the breadcrumbs that you want them to display, using those keywords that you choose. The best way to do that, make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually on your page with links, that you’re using schema markup. Ideally, it would match your URL structure, but that isn’t always necessary. So do a great breadcrumb optimization audit.
3. Meta Descriptions
Let’s optimize those meta descriptions. This is so old-school SEO. But a recent study shows that 30% of websites don’t even use meta descriptions. Now that’s understandable because another study shows that 70% of the time, Google will rewrite the meta description, usually because it’s not using the keywords that the user is searching for. But if we write a well-crafted meta description, it can compel users to click, and that means using keyword-rich descriptions that people are actually searching for, so when Google does use your meta description, it’s encouraging those clicks and acting as marketing copy for your website.
4. Numbers in Titles
Along with meta descriptions, titles. Search Pilot shared a study recently showing that dates added to titles increased rankings for a particular brand. Numbers are generally one thing that I always test in title tags that usually produce pretty consistent results. Specifically, dates in title tags are often a winner, January 2021.
Don’t be spammy about it. Don’t include it if it doesn’t make sense and don’t fake it. But if you can include a number, it will often increase your click-through rate for any given query.
5. <Title> Boilerplate
How about doing a boilerplate audit for your title tag? Tip number five. What’s boilerplate? Boilerplate are the parts of your title tag that repeat every single time.
For example, at Moz, they put “Moz,” their brand name at the end of every title tag. They used to put “Whiteboard Friday” at the end of every Whiteboard Friday until they tested it and found out that they actually got more clicks and higher rankings when they removed it. So boilerplate, you want your titles to be unique, provide unique value. So I would encourage you to experiment with your boilerplate and see if removing it actually increases your rankings.
Tip number six: schema, specifically FAQ and how-to schema. Google gave us a huge gift when they introduced these in search results. FAQ schema gives you a lot of SERP real estate. You can’t always win it, and you can’t always win the how-to schema, but when you do, that can definitely increase or influence people to click on your result, expand those FAQ schemas out.
It’s not appropriate for every page. You want to make sure that you actually have those FAQs on your pages. But it is one way, in appropriate situations, that you can increase clicks without increasing your actual Google ranking. All right.
Content can go stale after a few years. So we launch content. You have a blog, you launch it, and you share it on social media. Most people forget about it after that. So go back, look at your top content over the last two to five years or even 10 years, if you want to go back that far, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, keeping it on the same URL. In some cases, you can see gains of 500% to 1,000% just by relaunching some of your old content with some updates.
So do a relaunch audit in 2021.
8. Increase Internal Linking
Number eight: increasing internal linking. Now a lot of top SEO agencies, when they need to quickly increase rankings for clients, there are generally two things that they know are the easiest levers to pull. First, title tags and meta descriptions, what’s getting more clicks, but second is increasing the internal linking.
You know that you can increase internal links on your site, and there are probably some opportunities there that you just haven’t explored. So let’s talk about a couple easy ways to do that without having too much work.
9. Update Old Content with New Links
Number nine is updating your old content with new links. This is a step that we see people skip time and time again. When you publish a new blog post, publish a new piece of content, make sure you’re going back and updating your old content with those new links.
So you’re looking at the top keyword that you want to rank for, and going in Google Search Console or checking tools like Keyword Explorer to see what other pages on your site rank for that keyword, and then adding links to the new content to those pages. I find when I do this, time and time again, it lowers the bounce rate. So you’re not only updating your old page with fresh content and fresh links and adding relevance. You’re adding links to your new content. So make sure, when you publish new content, you’re updating your old content with those new links.
10. Remove Unnecessary Links
Number 10, remove unnecessary links from your content. Now this is a form of PageRank sculpting. PageRank sculpting is a dirty word in SEO, but actually it works to a certain extent. It’s not nofollow link page sculpting.
It is removing unnecessary links. Do you really need a link to your team page on every page of your website? Do you need a link to your contact form on every page of your website? In many cases, you don’t. Sometimes you do. But if you remove the unnecessary links, you can pass more link equity through the links that actually count, and those links are a major Google ranking signal.
11. Mobile Link Parity Audit
Number 11, need you to do a mobile link parity audit. What is that? What is a mobile link parity audit? That is ensuring that the links on your mobile site are the same as the links on your desktop site. Why is that important? Well, the last couple of years Google has moved to a mobile first index, meaning what they see on your mobile site, that’s your website.
That’s what counts. So a lot of sites, they have a desktop site, and then they reduce it to their mobile site and they’re missing links. They get rid of header navigation, footer links, and things like that. A recent study showed that the average desktop page has 61 links and the average mobile page has 54 links. That means on the web as a whole there are seven fewer links on mobile pages than desktop pages, meaning a lot of link equity is being lost.
So do a study on your own website. Make sure you have mobile link parity between your desktop and your mobile site so you’re not losing that equity.
12. Invest in Long-form Content
Number 12: need you to invest in long-form content. Now I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor. It is not. Short-form content can rank perfectly well. The reason I want you to invest in long-form content is because consistently, time and time again, when we study this, long-form content earns more links and shares.
It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results. Nothing against short-form content. Love short-form content. But long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck in terms of SEO ranking potential.
13. Use More Headers
When you’re doing that long-form content, make sure you do number 13: use more headers. I’m talking about H2 and H3 tags.
Break up your content with good, keyword-rich header tags. Why? Well, we have research from A.J. Ghergich that shows that the more header tags you have, generally you rank for more featured snippets. Sites with 12-13, which seems like a lot of header tags, rank for the most featured snippets of anything that they looked at in their most recent study.
So make sure you’re breaking up your content with header tags. It adds a little contextual relevance. It’s a great way to add some ranking potential to your content.
14. Leverage Topic Clusters
Number 14, leverage topic clusters. Don’t just launch one piece of content. Make sure you write about multiple pieces of content around the same subject and link those together. When you do that and you link them intelligently, you can increase engagement because people are reading the different articles.
You can add the right contextual inner links. I have a great case study that I want to show you in the transcript below, where someone did this and produced amazing results. So look into topic clusters for 2021.
15. Bring Content out of Tabs
Finally, bring your content out of tabs. If you have content that is in accordions or drop-downs or you have to click to reveal the content, study after study after study shows that content that’s brought out of tabs and brought into the main body, so people don’t have to click to see, generally performs better than content that’s hidden in tabs.
Now to be clear, I don’t believe that Google discriminates content in tabs. They seem to be able to index and rank it just fine. But I think people generally engage with content when it’s out of tabs, and maybe some of those signals help those pages to rank a little better.
Technical SEO
All right. Just a very few technical SEO tips. We’re going fast.
16. Core Web Vitals
Number 16: this is the year to invest in Core Web Vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google is bringing to the forefront in 2021. It’s going to be an actual ranking factor very soon. We’re talking about cumulative shift layout, hard word to say. Generally, we’re talking about site speed and delivering great page experience. Now some of these things are very technical, and Google has some tools, like Lighthouse, to try to help you to figure them out.
One tip I like to share, if you are on WordPress, I highly recommend using Cloudflare, in particular their APO for WordPress. It’s a great way to speed up your WordPress website and help you score better for some of these Core Web Vitals. It’s very low cost, it’s easy to implement, and it’s a great way to speed up your WordPress website.
17. Limit Sitemaps to 10,000
Number 17: sitemaps. Sitemaps, you’re allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap. This is always a question in every SEO quiz. How many URLs per sitemap are you allowed? Instead, if you have a large site and you have indexing issues, tip number 17, limit your sitemaps to 10,000 URLs. You don’t have to use all 50,000.
We have some evidence that using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can actually improve your crawlability of those. It’s kind of like Google might prioritize those in some way. The data seems to support it. You also get a little bit better data out of Google Search Console. You can see what’s being indexed and what’s not.
18. Leverage Dynamic Sitemaps
Also, leverage dynamic sitemaps. Oliver Mason shows that a dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based upon what you want Google to crawl. So if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, put the high priority ones in their own special sitemap.
Maybe you limit it to one thousand URLs. As Google crawls and discovers those, remove them and put in additional high priority URLs that you want Google to discover. Keep the sitemap small and tight, and let Google know that those are the ones that you want them to pay attention to.
Link Building
Let’s quickly talk about link building tips for 2021, because everybody loves link building.
No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and there are some great people in the industry who do love it, who are great at it. Personally, I’m not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.
19. Passive Link Acquisition
One way that I’m able to do that is number 19: passive link acquisition. What passive link acquisition means is creating content that passively earns links as people discover it in the SERPs.
It means I don’t have to outreach to people. It means that when they find it, when journalists find it, when bloggers find it, they naturally want to link to it. You do that by creating the types of content that journalists and bloggers and web creators are looking for. These are generally data, guides, definitions, how to, such as this post. When you create that kind of content, it generally earns a lot of links as people find it. Passive link building is one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time.
20. Page-level Link Intersect
Number 20, page-level link intersect. When you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. Now we’ve known for a long time one of the top SEO tips for link building is find websites that link to your competitors but not to you.
I like to make that a little more specific and find web pages that link to at least two of my competitors but not to me. That means that they are generally a resource page, if they’re linking to multiple competitors but not to me, and more likely to link to me if I ask them. There’s a great tool at Moz, Link Explorer, that does page-level link intersect. I think it’s the best tool for this specific task in the SEO industry, not because I’m biased, because I actually use it.
21. Be the Last Click
Tip number 21 for 2021, be the last click. What do I mean by that? I mean satisfy your users. Once you earn the first click, you want to get that first click that people click, but you also want to be the last click. That means they found what they are looking for. User satisfaction is ranking signal number one. Your goal with all of this is to satisfy the user, to give them what they search for.
That’s the magic of SEO. They’re searching for something, and you’re delivering it to them at the exact moment they search for it. When you can be the last click, you’re almost guaranteed to rise in rankings and get the traffic that you deserve.
…and that’s all folks, 21 tips to get your SEO in order and have you gaining an advantage over your competitors on search engine results pages 😜
You can keep your credit card in your pocket because today I’ll be revealing the top 15 free digital marketing tools you need to grow your business. These are tools that I’ve used myself and I’ve narrowed all the free options, right down to the most useful ones. To be included in our list, the tools had to meet the following criteria:
Actually free
Actually solves a real business problem
Actually recommended by the best in digital marketing
But I didn’t stop there. I also organized these 15 free digital marketing tools into categories, so you can easily find the tools you need.
O-dan.net
Canva
Photopea
Answer The Public
Grammarly
SEMrush
Yoast SEO & Plug In SEO
Google Search Console
Google Keyword Planner
Zapier
Mailchimp
Hootsuite
HotJar
Google Analytics
Asana
Ready to get started?
Let’s dive in!
15 Free Digital Marketing Tools For Your Small Business
Free Digital Marketing Tools Category #1: Images & Design
We all need stunning images… for our website, social media content, email marketing – you name it. So we thought it fits to start here.
O-dan.net makes finding stock images easy by aggregating all of the best stock image sites into one site. This saves you time so you don’t have to jump from site to site typing in the same search term over and over again to find the perfect image.
Using O-dan is super easy. You just type in the search term and select the site you want to view images from.
If you’re someone who lands in situations where you need to create graphics but are not a graphic designer, Canva is a lifesaver.
Out the box, Canva comes packed with easily editable design templates for any graphic design you may need.
Social media post? Canva has templates.
Logos? Canva has templates.
Business Cards? Canva has templates.
You name it, Canva has templates.
You simply click on the type of content you want to create and everything is sized and designed for you. You can also easily upload and use any content you have or make any needed changes to colors, text, images, and more to the pre-made templates to fit your brand or inspiration.
Canva also automatically saves your designs as you work on them so you can come back to them at any time and pick up where you left off.
Photo-peah or Photo-pee. But no matter how you pronounce it, Photopea is an amazing tool that allows you to edit photoshop files without Photoshop.
That’s right. You simply upload your .psd file into the tool and you have most of the same basic features you have in Photoshop within an online tool… for free.
This tool reminds me of a wrench. You might not use it very often but when you need it, you sure are glad it’s in your toolkit.
Free Digital Marketing Tool Category #2: Content Marketing
Writing great content is a proven strategy to build both brand awareness and brand loyalty.
These tools will help you improve your content marketing.
Coming up with new blog topics can be a challenge. I’ve written quite a lot over the years and you’d think I’d run out of topics by now but I don’t.
If you find yourself needing a bit of inspiration on what to write about for your blog, Answer The Public is worth a try.
Answer The Public listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and questions that people ask related to your keyword.
This leaves you with an ocean of useful content ideas.
Anybody else cringe when they see a typo? We know we do and it’s one of the reasons I love Grammarly.
Grammarly is the most used online grammar checker in the world – over 30 million people use it globally.
With an online editor, browser extension, and mobile app for iOS and Android, Grammarly works in the background while you write in your favorite application no matter where it is.
A red underline appears when there is a typo and you simply hover over it to select the correct spelling.
Easy, right?
Free Digital Marketing Tool Category #3: SEO
These tools will help improve your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
SEMrush is a powerhouse SEO tool that packs a ton of incredible features like keyword research, keyword tracking, backlink tracking, site audits, and more.
Though my personal favorite way to use SEMrush is to spy on the SEO strategies of my client’s competitors. That’s right – James Bond Style.
All you have to do is type in a URL and SEMrush provides you with every keyword they rank for, every page on their site that ranks, all the backlinks they have received, and even shows you any google ads they are running.
If you have not used SEMrush to get a sneak peek into your competitor’s SEO strategy, today is a good day.
If you want to get traffic to your site from search engines like Google, it is important for your site to have good SEO.
Yoast SEO and Plug In SEO are tools for WordPress and Shopify sites that make optimizing your site for SEO easier by walking you through SEO best practices without needing to know code or become an SEO expert.
I use Yoast SEO to easily add titles and meta descriptions to site pages and posts and rely on it to make sure the on-page SEO is up-to par.
Google’s Keyword Planner is one of the best keyword planners there is to build strong keyword lists and conduct keyword research for your SEO.
Simply search a single keyword or a set of keywords and Google’s Keyword Planner will provide you with an overload of related keyword ideas and related search volumes.
Free Digital Marketing Tool Category #4: Automation
Fun Fact about us. We love automation. We try to automate EVERY business task we can. And for good reason: automation saves time and minimizes human error.
The problem with automation though is that it requires an understanding of software API’s which we know nothing about. Well, that’s not a problem anymore.
Zapier is an automation tool that connects the business software you use into workflows. It works with over 1,300 business software tools like Gmail, Google Drive, and Facebook, and “Zaps” the two or more applications together so they integrate with one another.
Here is an example of a Zap you could perform: When you get a new email in Gmail, copy the attachment from Gmail to Dropbox, and alert yourself in Slack about the new Dropbox file.
Performing that action by hand would take a ton of time, especially if you perform that action on a consistent basis.
Some of my clients use Zapier to zap their leads from their website or Facebook lead forms into a Google Sheet or CRM so they can easily keep track of them. The possibilities are endless so start thinking about the ways you can save time in your business through automation with Zapier.
Free Digital Marketing Tools Category #5: Email Marketing
Email marketing remains a revenue generating marketing activity. In fact, 59% of people say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions, and marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
So which free email marketing software is the best to use for your business?
Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email marketing tools today. Mostly because it is a non-complicated tool that packs great templates, features, and analytics.
Mailchimp allows you to build segmented email lists, send out newsletters, and build email automation campaigns.
The free plan allows up to 2,000 contacts and 10,000 sends per month, with a daily send limit of 2,000.
Definitely ideal for a business just getting started who wants to grow.
Free Digital Marketing Tools Category #6: Social Media Scheduling
When it comes to creating content for your social media channels, one of the best time-saving activities you can do is schedule out your content in advance.
Let’s take a look at the #1 free platform for social media scheduling.
Hootsuite is a social media platform that allows you to schedule multiple posts in advance across multiple channels.
Hootsuite also allows you to monitor and respond to comments as well.
At a price of free, you can connect 3 social profiles, schedule 30 messages, and have 1 user.
Free Digital Marketing Tools Category #7: Website Optimization
Website optimization is one of those things that, if done correctly, will automatically result in an increase in revenue for your business. A mere 1% increase in your website conversion rate can do wonders for your revenue.
Here are the top free website optimization tools you can use today:
Ever wondered exactly how your website visitors use your site? HotJar is a feedback tool that provides heat maps of your website so you can better understand how visitors interact with your website.
HotJar helps you to:
1. Access visitor recordings so you can see in real-time how they are moving through your site. 2. Uncover the sections and pages on your site that cause visitors to leave. 3. Break down the areas of your site that cause clicks, movements, and scrolls.
1. Understand what pages on your website are performing the best and worst 2. Discover what products, sources, and pages convert the best on your website 3. Gain insight into what devices are being used on your website 4. Understand your website visitors better with reports on demographics, interests, and behavior
Free Digital Marketing Tools Category #8: Project Management
Ever tried to juggle multiple projects, teams or tasks without a clear system for accountability and deadlines? If you have, you know how difficult it is and how important great project management tools are.
Asana is a well-known and easy to use project management software that can help you and your team organize, manage, and deliver tasks.
Asana is packed with a ton of features such as:
unlimited tasks
unlimited projects
unlimited file storage
free integrations with tools like Gmail and Zapier, IOS and Android apps
…and much more.
The free plan allows for collaboration with up to 15 users.
Other notable free project management tools you can check out include Teamwork and Trello.
Quick Recap
Well there you have it! 15 free digital marketing tools you can use to manage and expedite the growth of your business.
As a recap, I went over tools for 8 categories: Imagery & Design, Content, SEO, Automation, Email Marketing, Social Media Scheduling, Website Optimization and Project Management.
If that wasn’t impressive enough, Instagram posts that are focused around contests earn nearly 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes compared to regular posts.
2. Choose the Prize
