Online contests are all the buzz. But what’s the best platform? I’ll show you in this video. Stay tuned.

Hey everybody, I’m Dave from that Ltd life, where I review software tools with lifetime offers. Today we’re talking about Raffle Press. I’ve got their sales page up now right out of the gates. One thing that they do that I know kind of rubs a lot of people the wrong way is they have a little bit of false scarcity on their home page. Now this lifetime deal has been running since Raffle Press launched back in July.

However, if I click on what I want, my lifetime license, you’re going to see a fake counter come up here that says there’s about 4 hours left, give or take a few minutes. Now, I don’t know when this Ltd is going to end. I’m sure it is not going to be something like Thrive Cart where it’s up for two or three years at a time. However, we just don’t know when it’s going to end. So right now this lifetime deal for Raffle Press is going to be $359.

That is including their 20% discount that they have for kind of their launch offer. So I don’t know if they’re going to pull that offer away at some point. Really, everything’s kind of up in the air. But you know what, I’m ready to give away some software. So that’s what we’re going to do in this video.

I’m going to make a contest and we’re legitimately going to give away some software licenses. What are we giving away? Well, Starfish Reviews has generously given us three different plans that I can award to winners. And basically throughout the rest of this video, I’m going to go through the process of setting up the contest. I’ll post the contest page so you can enroll and try to win a free license.

So here are the plans that I’m able to give away as the prizes. You’ll get one year of the webmaster plan for the first place winner. The second place winner will get one year of the marketer plan and the third place winner will get one year of the business plan. So that’s what we’re doing here. Big thanks to Starfish reviews.

Go ahead and check out the review that I did of their software tool. So here is the back end of a brand new WordPress installation. I’ve already gone ahead and installed Raffle Press. You can see it right down here. Let’s go ahead and add a new giveaway.

So the first thing you want me to do is title the giveaway. I’ll go ahead and do that. Next, I need to select a template. I’m going to go ahead and choose this. Grow your email list.

You can demo it if you want, but I’m just going to go ahead and choose that. Now. Here we are in the back end. This is their page builder for the contest. I can title the Brizy up here.

Now I can add an image to my contest right here. I’ll hit select image and let me drag and drop the Starfish reviews logo in here. Choose that. All right. Now I can click done editing.

And this is what my contest is starting to look like. Now of course, I need people to do something for entering the contest. So I’ve got two choices here. I can have them either log in with Facebook or use their email address to log in. Now, you’re all familiar with giveaway platforms.

Often there are additional actions that you can take to get more entries to a contest. So one of the first ones down here is to join the email newsletter. And if I click on that over here, I can configure it. So the title is this tax. I’m just going to go ahead and leave it as is.

I think it’s pretty self explanatory. And you know what, I really want to reward people for joining the email newsletter. So I’m going to make that worth three points. Right here. It says trigger on sign up.

And if I hover over the question mark here, it tells me that what this does is automatically add someone who signs up for your contest to your email list. So you want to be careful about this. Depending on the GDPR rules in your country, in most places it’s just good common sense and good common practice to tell someone that they’re signing up for a newsletter. You don’t want to have someone sign up for a contest, not know they’re going to get emails and then start sending them emails. That’s just going to make everybody upset.

You do have the option to make this field mandatory. So if you do want to require people to sign up for your email list to sign up, I think this is a little bit better way to do it. So just toggle that on and you’ll be good to go. And you know what, I think I’m going to leave that one on because that’s the whole point of running this contest. I want to get people to sign up for my email list.

Right here we have the option to display a GDPR compliance checkbox. All you need to do to turn that on is go ahead and hit yes, and that’ll be shown to your registrants. And then most importantly, we need to get these email addresses into our email application. Now if I click right here, I’ll be able to choose some of the integrations now out of the box. It works with Active campaign similar content contact ConvertKit, Drip MailChimp and Zapier.

However, I skipped over one and it’s a very important one. It’s one of the reasons that I like Raffle Press so much is that it works with HTML web forms. So when I go ahead and choose this, what I can do is actually head over to my sendy installation right here and I can grab my HTML form. Go ahead and just copy this. We paste it in over here.

And now this is working with Sendy. How great is that? I can test this out. Now, heading back over to Sendy, I can see that my test did go ahead and go through, so it’s working properly. All right, so the email opt in is all configured, but we can ask people to do other things as well.

If I click right here where it says Add actions is a list of all of the different actions we can ask people to take. Let’s see. I think I would like them to go ahead and watch this video. So go ahead and click on this. And now what I’m going to have to do do is actually go ahead and after I upload this video, come back to the contest and I can enter in the video URL right here.

But I’ve gone ahead. And for now I’ve titled it. Watch the Raffle press review. And you’re going to go ahead and get two points for doing that. Let’s go ahead and add another action.

You know what I’d also like people to do is subscribe to the YouTube channel. So let’s go ahead and choose this one right here. It says visit a YouTube channel. But you know what, I’ll just add in subscribe to the YouTube channel. I’ll make that worth two points as well.

Now I’m going to go ahead and type in my YouTube URL here. And a little tip, if you’ve never heard of this before, you can add this little bit of code at the end of your YouTube channel. It’s question mark. Sub underscore confirmation equals one. And then when people visit that channel, it’ll prompt them say, hey, would you like to subscribe to this?

And I feel like that’s okay here because I’m telling them, subscribe to the YouTube channel. So it’ll kind of make sense that’s what they’re being told to do. Now, every viral giveaway contest should have the option to share with friends. So let’s go ahead and add some options that do that. First we’ll just do the regular old referend viral and we’ll go ahead and give that five points and we can enable it on any platform that we like here.

Let’s go ahead and turn it on, all of them. All right, I think that’s looking pretty good for my contest. I don’t want to ask people to do too many things or they probably won’t do any at all, but there are some pretty clever options here. You can do things like asking questions, have a poll or a survey, or have them submit an image. So you could do maybe like a caption contest or an image contest where people submit an image and you could judge the winner from there.

All right, next we’re going to go over here where it says Design. And this is where I’ll be able to tailor the look of the contest a little bit more to match the brand. Right here, I can change the button color so I can change it to be red if I want. There is the hex option. So if you need to match your specific brand colors, you have the option to do that.

Now this option here is to set a page background color. But I want to emphasize that you don’t actually need to set a page background color because you can embed this widget as a shortpixel if you already have a WordPress based website. Now, that brings me up to another point. If you are working with clients that don’t use WordPress, don’t worry, you can still use Raffle Press. All you need to do is set up a subdomain install WordPress and you could basically have this be a standalone giveaway platform and you could run contests for other companies.

So I’m just going to choose a neutral color background here so you can kind of see that there is in fact another background there. That dark one looks pretty good with the blue and starfish. All right, let’s go ahead. There is the option to add some custom CSS here if you want. I’m not going to do that in this video.

Let’s head down to the settings here. This is the last tab that we have to go through with Raffle Press. This is where you’re going to set up the overall rules for your giveaway. And there’s giveaway rules right here and they actually have a built in generator to get you going. I’m going to go ahead and fill out the Raffle Press rules generator here.

I’ll be right back. All right, so I’ve got my rules generator all figured out. I’m going to go ahead and hit generate rules here. And you can see that it just spits out some kind of boilerplate information for you. Now, I will emphasize that you probably need to have a lawyer look over something like this if you’re concerned about any sort of liability.

I’m not really sure of the legalities of running contests worldwide, whether that is something that is viable to do. In this case, I’m just giving away software. I’m not asking for anything of monetary value in exchange. So I’m going to go ahead and just roll with it. Let’s go ahead and save these rules.

Now in the general section up here, you can actually set the permalink. So this will be the main page for the giveaway that you’ll want to promote. There are some display options here for whether I want to hide the total number of entries or show winners. After the contest is done, I’m going to turn that on. I always wonder, did they actually give away the prize?

And so I’ll turn that on here. And the next option is to limit sign VPs per IP. I would recommend turning that on on you. You can limit sign ups to three sign ups per IP so that one person can’t enroll 150 times and then have a greater chance of winning. And then down here we have the option to turn off branding.

I’ll go ahead and do that because I know that everybody out there wants to turn off branding. Although sometimes it’s nice to promote these platforms so they can get some more customers. But it is nice that you can turn that off. I think on King Sumo, you really cannot get rid of the branding no matter what you do. Now, if you leave branding on, you can actually turn on the affiliate URL right here so that you could make a little bit of money if someone makes a purchase.

And you know what, I might as well turn that back on. All right, so my general settings are good to go. I’m going to go ahead and hit save here. Under Email Verification, this is where you could set up a double opt in type of procedure. I’m going to leave that off right here, but it’s good to know that it’s there.

Under Success Tracking, you can add in some scripts so that after someone has completed an entry to the contest, you’ll be able to follow them through a Facebook Pixel or a Google Analytics Pixel and you can possibly remarket them down the road. Under Success Redirect, you’ll be able to send someone to a particular website after they sign up for the contest. I’ll go ahead and turn that on and we’ll just send people right over to that Ltd Life website. Under Social Logins, this is where you can allow people to log in with Facebook. I’ll go ahead and turn that on.

GDPR Consent you can go ahead and turn this on right here. Now you might be wondering why is this here when we already talked about GDPR under the email opt in. Well, maybe you’re not using email opt in for your contest and if you’re not, then you’ll want to turn this on. But because we are and I turn that on over there, I don’t think I need to have it twice. Now.

Under Recapture, you can turn this on, which is invisible reCAPTCHA. So that’s important to know. You don’t have to enter the code or find all of the traffic lights. But what this will do is weed out those spam bots that are trying to automatically enroll in contests. And believe me, they are out there and they are looking for contests as a kind of keyword grounding around the internet, looking for anything that they can try to force their way into winning.

So setting this up will require a little bit of work inside of Google, but I do recommend going ahead and turning that one on. Now, there’s only one thing left to do and that is choose a start date and an end date for the contest. Let’s go ahead and do that right now. That’s back on the general details page right up here. I’ll choose the start date as the 21 December and let the contest run for six days ending on the 27th.

Now I’m going to go ahead and start this up at, let’s say twelve noon right here. And we’ll go ahead and end it at twelve noon as well. Let me just set my time zone. Go ahead and save this. And now if I head back to that perma link that I set in the settings, remember, that was under general.

This contest, well, says it’s not currently running, but that’s what it’s going to look like. It starts in three days. So go ahead and get signed up and good luck. I hope you win the copy of Starfish Reviews. So my final thoughts on Raffle Press.

This is definitely my favorite giveaway platform that I’ve ever used. It’s got all the options that I want. It integrates with HTML, web forms like a breeze. Just copy and paste, we’re good to go. All of the colors are customizable.

I can install it on as many websites as I want. I don’t have any limitations of entries. Man. The only downside to it is the little bit of a hefty price tag when it comes to Ltds. Now if you’re comparing this to a deal that’s on AppSumo, yes, it looks very expensive.

However, if you compare it to another giveaway platform, that’s like maybe a software as a service and it’s going to limit you to say 10,000 entries per month and it’s going to cost $60 or $70 per month, well then that $359 doesn’t seem like a terribly huge investment. So in my opinion, I think Raffle Press is definitely worth it if you are running contests for clients. Now, maybe you don’t need something like this if you’re only going to do a one off deal, but if that’s part of the work that you do, I think it’s a really wise investment to make. I’m going to go ahead and give Raffle Press a 9.7 out of ten. This is a great plugin.

If you need to run contests, this is the go to. So that’s going to do it for this video. If you’ve enjoyed the video, make sure you hit the like button subscribe and click that notification bell if you haven’t already. And hey, if you’ve got a better viral giveaway platform that I don’t know about yet, let me know down in the comments. I want to hear about it.

I’ll see you in the next review.