How Giveaway Winners Are Chosen

You know it was recently brought to my attention, that maybe many people who enter blog giveaways don’t realize how a winner is chosen. I wanted to take a moment to explain how I choose a giveaway winner and how most other bloggers do as well.

When a giveaway submission comes through to me first I find out if I am going to charge my giveaway fee for hosting it or receive the same or similar product package in exchange for hosting said giveaway. I then wait to receive whatever form of compensation I will be receiving and if a product is submitted I must take time to fully review the product so that I can share my opinion based on the family experience with said product.

Once I am ready to write up the giveaway I get online and log into my dashboard for my blog. I then write up the giveaway based on my normal practices and requests the sponsor has asked of me to include. From there the giveaway will run about 7-14 days depending upon the request of the sponsor or my personal feeling of how long I think the giveaway needs to run to fully be promoted.

The giveaway date and end time come along, I try to close the comments and if I didn’t then I delete any comments received after the end date/time. The next steps are easier written in bullet points so here goes:

• I review all comments to ensure everyone followed the rules.
• For those comments who did not enter correctly based on that particular giveaway rules I delete them without notice (as is usually written in all my giveaway posts).
• After I get a total number of comments aka entries I open a new tab in my browser to go to Random.org.
• Random.org has a true random number generator on their site on the right hand side that I place the number 1 and then the last number of entries into the number fields.
• I then click “generate” one time to have it choose a number.
• The number chosen is the winner so I go back to the other tab where my giveaway post is open and look at the numbered comments.
• Once I get to the correct number I then know who the winner is.
• After the process is complete I try to take screen captures but do not always do this to ensure I can include a photo so that there are no questions on who the winner is.
• If I did take screen shots I will upload them to my site and include them in the winning post and schedule the post to go live at my next set posting date/time.

After the winner has been announced live, and sometimes beforehand, I contact the winner and let them know they won. I ask the winner to leave a comment on the winner announcement post and reply to my email with the information I need for that particular giveaway. So there you have it, in a nutshell “how giveaway winners are chosen” in a blog giveaway or at least a Happily Blended Blog giveaway.

Any questions? Any tips on what you do as a blogger for giveaway winner selections?