Hosting contests or organizing a give away is one of the best strategies that you can use to drive traffic into your website/ blog. This is an age old idea that is used by almost all the webmasters around the web. But hosting a contest or a give away can be a tedious job to a few at least. Finding out a sponsor or a gift to be given is the only tough job behind the scene. The prizes need not be really expensive to drive attention, gifting an ear phone or a domain name can also be equally competent. Today we will give you a few ideas that can be used to host a contest without much your pocket money being drained. If you have a blog that isn't really new in the blogosphere, these tips can help you a lot to boost your online presence.

Finding out a sponsor.

1. Find Out a Third Party Sponsor
Finding out a sponsor for your give away should be the first step in organizing a contest. Sponsors can be of different types depending upon your site's popularity and traffic. If your blog belongs to newbie category, it is always preferable to approach some software firms or cloud storage sites. These firms do not need any capital to give away their products such as a software license or a premium cloud storage account, and therefore there are higher chances of these groups cooperating with you. An antivirus, internet security or any other popularly used software can be offered as a prize, and these software are indeed a benefit to the winners.
If you have a site that has comparatively higher amount of traffic and popularity, then try to find out materialistic prizes such as gadgets or accessories, as these gifts can obviously drive higher attention, but you need to prove yourself to the sponsor that you are worth the sponsorship.

2. Sponsor Yourself
If you are a very beginner and you website is really new, it is hard to find sponsors for your contests. That does not mean that you cannot host a contest. Sponsor it yourself. Keep aside some of your pocket money for this. It doesn't matter how small the prize is, it is just the give away that matters. Drive maximum traffic with the efforts you make. Bring up your site. Establish your presence. And later on, you will have sponsors waiting for you.

How to count on the Entries and Manage your contests. 
The next step is organizing the contest. Promoting your contest. Managing the entries. Choosing the winners. And there goes it. Managing the contest can be done easily using some contest managers that are available free with limited features and paid with premium features. Rafflecopter is one such service that can be used to manage your contests or give away-s. Rafflecopter can be clubbed with almost all the social networking sites, email clients and most of the web platforms. You can choose from the wide range of options to count on the entries and Rafflecopter can easily manage the entries based on their actions which can be counted or rejected. You can ask your readers to share a post, post a tweet, comment on your blog or anything else and Rafflecopter can easily track them, hence you do not have the head aches of organizing or verifying the entries. This site also offers a free service with limited features which can be used to host your initial contests.

Promoting your contests, sharing the word.
The best way to promote your contest is asking the contestants to share the word through social networking sites, and counting on entries based on their number of posts or re-tweets. This is really effective and might reach millions from mouth to mouth. Share about the contest through your Fan pages, emails and let your friends know while you talk. If you have a better budget and would like to reach a higher amount of audience, then start advertising too.