Free Domain Names: Give Them to Your Visitors and Reap the Rewards – Part 3

Today you’ll see that offering domain names for free is a good way to get more backlinks for your sites and/or make people subscribe to your content.

Link building

Since building links is a major concern for many webmasters nowadays, I chose to start with this topic. Here’s how you can use domain giveaways for link building purposes:

• Create a contest (e. g., “write a blog post about my site”). Domain names will be the prizes.
• Have contestants link to your site or blog. Make sure they use your desired anchor text. If I were you, I’d offer various anchor text options and let each contestant pick their favourite one.
• It may be a good idea to limit participation to webmasters who own sites related to your niche.
• If your contest is a one-shot event, those who don’t get any prizes may simply remove your links or add a no-follow tag to them afterwards. To avoid this, you could run periodic contests, so contestants feel encouraged to keep your links on their sites for longer.

Subscribers and members

Do you want to get more subscribers to your newsletter or RSS feed? Or more members for your forums and membership sites? Domain giveaways can help you a lot:

• Offer free domain names to your most active forum members. Make it clear that only those who write quality posts will be awarded. Unless you really don’t mind having lots of “me too” messages on your boards.
• Ask your blog readers to subscribe to your RSS feed by email. Then compile a subscriber email list and run a draw. The owner of the drawn address will be given a free domain.
• The idea above also applies to newsletters. To ensure that your subscribers will actually open and read your emails, you could have them answer questions about each issue. Only those who sent you correct answers would be entered in your free domain draw.

These tips are enough to keep you busy until I publish the final post in this series. It will show you how free domain name offers can be used to generate more visitor activity on your site. Remember, you won’t miss my future suggestions if you subscribe to The WebMaster Blog.