7 Ways of Using Competitions to Generate More Engagement, Fans and Sales For Your Kindle Book.

Competitions are an excellent way of driving more sales for your Kindle business. Not sure how? Well, then, stick around and I will show you how you can use competitions to really move the needle for your Kindle business in a short space of time.

1.  Do your research.

Before you do anything else, we highly recommend you start following some of your competitors across different social media platforms and having a look at how they have structured their book competitions and the sort of engagement they are getting in terms of likes, shares and comments.

2.  Decide on a prize.

Deciding on the right prize is exceptionally important, it is a competition after all. We highly recommend you using the research you did in step 1 to gauge the sort of prize and the price range that would be most appropriate.

As a rule of thumb, you don’t want something so expensive that it will make you feel uncomfortable, but nothing so cheap that no one wants to enter, and something that is somewhat linked to your book genre or books in general, to dissuade irrelevant serial competitor enterers.

3.  Choose the details.

Once you have chosen your prize, it’s now time to decide on the competition details. This will include the start date and deadline for entries as well as the winner announcement date and method.

4. Make it enticing.

If your competition post copy isn’t engaging, interesting and compelling then it’s going to be very hard to get as many people as you want to enter. Work hard on making the competition sound irresistible, something a person has to enter. This goes for the accompanying image(s) too.

5.  Write a post for the medium.

When you do write your social media copy and choose the accompanying image, make sure it suits the social network you are going to be posting it on. We highly recommend you posting your competition across all the social networks you are active on but making sure you tailor the copy and image for each network. The copy and image you would use for Instagram may not necessarily be the right one for Twitter.

6.  Get it to spread like wildfire.

There are a number of things you can do to get your competition to spread like wildfire and with it grow your followers, fans and hopefully generate some sales off the back of all that buzz.

One powerful thing you can do is making it a requirement for someone who enters your competition to share the post with 2-5 other people and/or tag 2-5 other people in the post. Having this as a pre-requisite for people applying means that your post has a much higher chance of going viral and spreading to a larger number of relevant people.

Another thing you can do to help your competition spread far and wide is to use popular and trending hashtags.

Finally, if you have some money to spend, we highly recommend running the competition post as a paid social media ad and targeting it to the precise audience you are wanting to attract. 

But, please do your research before setting up the ad and spending the money to ensure you spend the money wisely. And, as always, don’t spend more than you are willing to lose.

7.  Choose a winner & contact them

Once the competition has come to an end then we recommend you choosing a winner at random manually or by using software that will pick someone at random.

Then it’s just a case of contacting the lucky person and letting them know the good news.

It’s a good idea to also announce the winner publicly on your profile and let your fans/followers know of the date of the next competition if you have decided on one.