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When entering an online giveaway, is giving an e-mail necessary when you’ve left your blog link?

Many online giveaways require that you provide a valid e-mail address so they can easily contact you if you win. I would say you need to leave your e-mail address even if you also leave a link to your blog. My reasoning is that if the host has to track you down, they may just choose another winner so it’s not as much work for them. Whether that’s right or wrong, it’s a possibility.

On the other hand, leaving your e-mail in a comment opens the door for spammers to collect your e-mail address. One way to deter spambots (the little code robots spammers send out to collect data, similar to how search engines look for key words) is to type your e-mail without using the @ or . in the address. For example: bloggingbasics101 AT gmail DOT com. Just about everyone knows to change the AT to @ and the DOT to the .

If you do choose to leave a link to your blog instead of leaving your e-mail address, make sure your e-mail or contact information is clearly marked on your blog. It won’t do any good if the host actually clicks to your blog and still can’t find and easy way of contacting you.

I use Typepad for my blogs. When I receive a comment, I can automatically respond to specific commentators because they have had to type in their e-mail addresses in order to leave a comment. They don’t have to re-type their address in the body of the message because my host already includes it in the message.

So what do you think? How do you handle this with your own online giveaways and such?

2 thoughts on “When entering an online giveaway, is giving an e-mail necessary when you’ve left your blog link?”

  1. Oh I JUST went through this with the last Bloggy Giveaway. As Liz said, it’s time-consuming and more than a little annoying to have to go on a blog expedition to track down winners, especially when you consider that for this particular giveaway carnival there are usually hundreds of entries.

    I was as blunt as I could possibly be for this last giveaway:

    http://lizzieshome.com/2008/04/26/bloggy-giveaway-winner/

    I made it obvious that I required an email address to be written in full with each comment, and not to rely on the blog link (I also did the spelling out ‘at’ and ‘dot’ too – fell for the scraper-bot thing myself during the giveaway in early Feb and had to change emails after being inundated with spam – not fun). I must have stressed the point of including an email in the comment a bazillion times. I STILL had people who didn’t pay attention to the directions. The first few I let through but in the end I had to delete over 10% of my entries (something like 20 people) because because honestly? It ticked me off that people were in such a rush to enter a comp that they totally ignored instructions. I feel very, very bad for deleting entries but sheesh. I also thought it was unfair for the folk who did pay attention. Leave in the invalid entries and the good guys’ chances of winning drop.

    Cheers,
    Lizzie

  2. I actually started a new contest this morning and this time I did require that an email address be left in the comment field. Last contest, it took me a considerable amount of time to track down email addresses from profiles on blogger, and then I still couldn’t find some addresses – what a waste of my time! I’d rather be writing great content than clicking fifty links to hoepfully find an email address.

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