On the Contextures Blog, I ran a week long Excel giveaway, with a nice collection of prizes from some generous sponsors.
The entries included some hilarious Excel horror stories, and a few creative Excel Hallowe’en costume suggestions. I enjoyed reading them, and the giveaway page got good traffic, so others must have enjoyed them too.
After the giveaway deadline passed, the real work began. I copied all the names, emails and comment numbers from the blog, and cleaned them up in Excel.
For a similar giveaway in July, I created a macro to draw the prize numbers and winning comment numbers. It worked very well, so I used it again for the fall giveaway.
Finally, I wrote the prize announcement post, and will email all the winners and prize sponsors with details on how to collect their prize.
A giveaway is a fair amount of work, but creates interest and traffic for a blog. I hope the prize sponsors saw some increased traffic too. If so, they might be willing to sponsor another giveaway, when we all recover from this one.
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