It’s been a little bit since we did a proper giveaway.
We’re due…and it’s coming!
Watch this space tomorrow morning as we announce a fantastic giveaway sponsored by a community provider with some very nice prizes.
Review: Gleam
I spent the week working on some art and the Gleam integration. It’s quite a bit of work – building out the artwork with prizes, essential info, some logos…then configuring Gleam (with its innumerable quirks and limitations).
Gleam is the website plugin that handles our giveaways. Entrants complete “actions” (visiting web pages, following the sponsor on social media, etc.) in exchange from entries. Gleam handles all the recording of this and picks the winners at the end.
Overall, Gleam has been a solid platform for us. It’s relatively easy to use, as the wizard walks through populating standard terms, loading prizes, and configuring all the “ways to enter”. It’s time consuming, sure, but there’s no other way to get the info loaded.
Gleam is strong on the upsell. We have the Hobbyist plan, and so there are some integrations we can’t do, such as LinkedIn. But step up is $120/year to $468/year. Where it bites is when sponsors want to do many prizes. At our plan level, we’re limited to 5 prizes…at a the next tier up, we could do 25 prizes, but that’s a huge cost bump.
Once the contest is up and running, we like to do promotions to draw attention to it. So I’ll drop some secret codes for bonus in videos, etc. Gleam makes this easy, though there is a limit to how many of the same action you can have (again, pay more, more generous limits) so that limits how many codes we can create.
At the end of the giveaway, Gleam does all the picking of winners so there’s no funny business. It also offers you the opportunity weed out suspicious entries. Click one button to nuke them all, or go through them one by one. It’s always a very small percentage of our entries so I nuke and move on. It is up to the contest sponsor to notify winners (Gleam doesn’t do that for you).
There are some things you’d really like that you can’t have which are outside of Gleam’s control. It’s possible to award entries for visiting a YouTube channel, for example, but you can’t track if a contest entrant has actually subscribed. Likewise, users can click on a button to be taken to a specific page you want them to see, but they might close that window a nanosecond later.
Still, for easy to deploy, scalable competitions, Gleam has worked well for us. As long as what you need fits in the pricing tier you want to pay for, it’s a solid platform.
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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