Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome for the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Now, welcome your hosts, David Waumsley. and Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there, and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. I'd just like to begin by saying happy new year. I hope that you enjoyed the holiday season and managed to get a little bit of time off. Obviously, I hope that you had a great 2019 and we're all looking forward to a equally good 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and this is episode 160 entitled running contests in WordPress with RafflePress.
It was published on Thursday the 2nd of January, 2020 just a few little bits of housekeeping before we begin. Head over to WP, build.com forward slash subscribe, and over there you'll be able to join our newsletters. Find out about the podcasts and the news that we release. As well as finding out about deals that crop up.
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Until the 8th of January and it's using RafflePress, which is the whole purpose of today's podcast. But we'll get onto that in just a moment or two. The last page is WP Builds.com forward slash advertise and if you go there, if you're a product or service owner of anything to do with WordPress, well hopefully we'll be able to put your product or service in front of a WordPress specific audience.
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So do yourselves a favor. Go check out, GoWP at gowp.com. And we do thank all of our sponsors for helping put on the WP Bill's podcast. Okay. Let's get to today's podcast interview. It is an interview this week with a chap called John Turner, who represents RafflePress. It is a WordPress plugin that enables you to very easily create contests.
Now, if you've ever filled out a contest online, especially over the last couple of years, you'll probably understand what this plugin does. It enables you to set up contest really easily. It guides you through it with a simple wizard, and it's got a nice admin interface, set up your prizes, and then offer a whole bunch of different ways that
People can enter that competition and then hopefully promote it for you and create some kind of viral loop whereby social media posts and so on, spread the competition and more people enter. It's a fabulous plugin. I must admit I'm using it myself at the moment. If you get to listen to this before the 8th of January, 2020 then you can go to WP Builds.com forward slash win and we've got a competition for WP.
Forms over there, so you might want to go and check that out and see exactly how it works. We talk about not just the plugin, we talk about John's thoughts on what makes a good competition, the size of the prize, how many different kind of entry forms should you have, whether people are becoming cynical about these kinds of competitions and are finding them too commonplace.
Things like GDPR crop, Papagan and so on and so forth. Anyway, it's really, really interesting. I really do. Personally recommend this product because as I say, I'm using it myself and have all of the WordPress solutions. I really do like this one very much indeed. So, okay. I hope that you enjoy the podcast.
Hello there. Welcome. Thank you for making it this far into the podcast. I'm glad that you've joined us again for another WP Builds episode. This week we're having an interview. We're having an interview with John Turner, who's all the way on the East coast of America. hello, John.
John Turner: [00:04:34] Hey, how are you doing Nathan?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:35] I'm good, thanks. Now John is working for a company called, well, the, the company that he's working for is called RafflePress. But, I think John, it's fair to say that, RafflePress is part of a bigger company. Is there a, is there a company? So living in the background of RafflePress?
John Turner: [00:04:51] Yes. I'll give you kind of a short history of it. So, I, was running a business on my own, about a year ago called seed pride, which did coming soon pages. And I had a small product that I sold with C prod called viral giveaways. And, about a year ago, I, submitted an application to awesome motive, which has lots of companies underneath it that you might've heard of, like
Optin monster and WP forms and monster insights. So just a lot of other plugins. I applied to accelerate our growth fund that they have, and I was accepted with that fund. And basically I was brought in under that umbrella and we decided to pull out my old plugin, which was a viral giveaway plug in and create a new plugin called RafflePress, and just make it really awesome and great for WordPress users.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:39] So, I actually remember reading the news about that. what, what have you called the accelerator program? Oh, that's great. I'm glad that it kinda came up, came around and please that we've got somebody on the podcast that benefited from it. Now you're going to find out about RafflePress by going to RafflePress.com. No surprises. It's exactly how you'd imagine it was spelled. No S no hyphens or anything like that. so what on earth is it? What, what is this product that you took from sort of less maturity to maturity in the last year? What's the point of it?
John Turner: [00:06:08] Sure. So, it is to run giveaways. So basically the idea here is that you run giveaways and you create a buzz and it helps you grow your, email list and a social medium followers. So, there are lots of platforms that are non WordPress, like a gleam or Rafflecopter. And like I said, I had a plugin that was specifically for WordPress, but it wasn't quite as mature as the other ones. And, when I joined it with Sayd, we decided to, really build something that was awesome. For WordPress, and that works natively with WordPress. So that's kinda how RafflePress came about. And, we've run it locally. We run it locally on all our sites, actually WP beginner.com, which is, one of our sites. Ran it to do a a birthday giveaway. And it was, it was amazing. he had just started a new Facebook group and I think he has over 10,000 people in it now.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:01] Wow, that's great. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, I mean, we'll come on to the options, but interestingly, you mentioned that you can kind of give away access to Facebook groups or you know, at least kind of make that a condition of entering the competition and so on. I'm just wondering, with these kind of competitions, so the just very, basically the principle is that you, you have some kind of reward. You give that reward away and you increase your chances of receiving that prize. If you go through a bunch of interactions prescribed things, that RafflePress sets up, you follow this action, you got more chances, you do something else, you get even more chances. So the idea is to, to, to encourage people to share on social media that this contest exists. Is that about right?
John Turner: [00:07:46] It is, yes, they're sharing on social media is one of the options, but there's a lot of different options you can do. You can have people watch a video, you know, leave a comment, invent your own, submit an image. There's just a lot of things that you can have them to do depending on what your goals are, of course. for people to get entries. And, basically. It just incentivizes people to take those actions as opposed to just saying, you know, follow me on Twitter.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:12] Right? But the primary purpose is to, is to gather in the as many email addresses as you can in a shorter space of time as possible. And in some ways, you know, share this out. you know, in order to get more email addresses. Okay. So my, my first question, which presumably you've got some sort of data on, cause you've been doing this for a while is, and it's very generic question, but what, what, what in your experience makes a good contest? So what I mean by that is, you know, I'm setting up a contest. I believe that I've got a prize which is worth giving away. So let's focus on that to begin with. do you have any kind of metrics about. What kind of things entice people, what kind of prizes you can give away? Can you, can you give away like real world things like tickets to the next baseball game? Or is this, is this system's so hooked up with WordPress that it has to be something digital and online.
John Turner: [00:09:02] Sure. So, so we'll start with basically what you can give away so you can give away anything. the, the RafflePress plugin simply picks winners for you, and as far as delivering whatever it is to those winners is up to you. So it'll pick winners and then it'll say, here's their email address. And then, you can contact them and, you know, get, You know, sending them their prize. You can also ask a question. So if you're shipping something, you say, what is your address? Right? And that's one of the entry options. And they get entries for that. And then if they're the winner, you can ship to the address. So you can give away pretty much anything. Okay. That's as far as the prize. It depends on your audience. So for example, the WP beginner birthday, was huge and it attracted a lot of people we worked with, Basically hundreds of vendors to get a huge pro over $124,000 worth of prizes. Now, obviously not everybody's going to do that, but what you want to do is get something that really excites your audience, right? So if you're, you know, have designers or something like that, you could give away an iPad. It just depends. You just. Want to get something that's going to excite the audience and get them to want to join your giveaway. And of course, it's just going to depend on what your goals are and the audience that you're marketing to.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:18] Yeah. One of the, one of the things that WP Builds does is we run these contests, and very, very often it's like a plugin developer or a theme developer will come along and say, look, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to be involved in doing a giveaway on your, your website. And so we do that. And one of the . Things that I've noticed is if the, if the prizes kind of modestly. Okay, then it's very difficult to persuade people to, you know, I mean, let's be honest, people have got a certain cynicism about entering their name into a field of a website and certainly given up their email address. Because the trade off has to be worth it. And so I've noticed that if the prize is modest, then the entries are very, very modest, and as you go towards a decent prize, the entries sort of creep up, but it's only when the prize becomes really extraordinarily interesting that then it begins to take off. That's, that's my 2 cents on that. Anyway.
John Turner: [00:11:12] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's what we've seen as well. You know, it's got a gotta give them value or can't just kind of half, half do it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:20] Do you, do you have any insight or again, data on whether or not, like one price tends to . A focus the mind a little bit more. So let's take the, let's take the example of an iPad. if you were to give away one iPad, does that, does that sort of give get the same interest as maybe like two I-phones or does it distill it if there's more prizes? Or does it just kind of skyrocket it if there's more prizes
John Turner: [00:11:44] So typically if there's more prizes. And the potential for more winners. Then it gives the person that's entering the feeling that they have a better chance than one, and whatever. The number of entered, right. So typically, now we don't have a lot of data. I mean, the only data we have is internal data because since it's a plugin, it installs on people's sites. So we don't collect data from people's sites. So, typically we do run multiple prizes within our, our, companies, and that tends to work well for us.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:17] Yeah. Have you, have you any thoughts on whether or not people are. I'm still responding to this kind of marketing. Obviously, if you were to wind that, rewind the clock maybe two or three years, this, this whole thing was brand new. It was emergent. You know, a few early developers came out with this notion and, and it's, it seemed to sort of grow slowly and now I see this kind of prize being offered all the time. And, and usually with that goes a certain level of, cynicism, I would say, and a reluctance to fill out the fields. Any, any thoughts on that?
John Turner: [00:12:48] Yeah. I mean it definitely still worse cause we see a lot of people using not just our plugin, but other people's plugins. And especially in the WordPress space, there are, I can name three or four companies off the top of my head that are doing upcoming giveaways, right? That are huge companies and not, not to mention our own companies to be people beginner. Like I said, ran, the birthday giveaway. I think we had over 40,000 entries and, Yeah. You know, it was huge. It was absolutely huge. And, and the Facebook group for that was totally new at the time, and it was all said and done. I think he's got over 10,000. 10,000 members now. So yeah, that list, not everybody has that size mailing lists, but they, the point is they do still work if it's done properly.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:35] Yeah. And I suppose doing it properly is, is like crafting your, your page correctly and, you know, positioning the, the, the text in such and such a way so that you, you know, you market it successfully and so on. And also, I suppose giving it a certain period of time for the competition to mature. One of the things that I quickly worked out was that if you, if you run a very, very short Swift competition, that is much less effective than, than extending it over a period of weeks. I did once where it was just five or six days, and then I figured out, Oh, okay. Like three, three weeks to a month is certainly better because you know, people are sharing and then people discovering other people's Twitter feeds a couple of weeks later. Oh, okay. I didn't, didn't know that existed. And so that, that, that I, that is something I found.
John Turner: [00:14:18] Yeah. We T we typically run them from two to three weeks there. Just give him enough time to marinate, but not enough time where people kind of forget about it. Right. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:26] So when, when the, the emails are sort of sucked into the platform, do they, do they live within the RafflePress? You know, the, the table in the database or are there options to automatically send those over to some service which you might be using? So maybe, I don't know, active campaign or MailChimp or perhaps you've even got, things like Zapier to send it off wherever you fancy. Yup.
John Turner: [00:14:51] Yup. So basically we have an action. So actions are things that people can earn entries with the plugin. And the action that we have for emails specifically is join a newsletter and you can rename it. But basically what that does is that connects up to a third party service like MailChimp or active campaigners or a Zapier. And we also have the ability of, if we don't. I have a direct integration with one of those. Then we have something called an HTML form where you can just take the HTML form from that provider that you would embed on your site and paste it in our plugin and we'll post to it in the background. So we, we can pretty much integrate with any service. And as far as where that email goes. we have a couple of ways. So by default, the join newsletter action is basically what will happen is you'll run a giveaway and someone will enter the giveaway, and when they enter it, that email is stored in WordPress, but it's not sent to the third party. Email service provider until you click join newsletter. We also have an option to trigger that action automatically when somebody signs up for a giveaway. And depending on where you're live and some of the laws and G, GDPR, some people play with that, right? because, there's consent and things like that. So there's a couple of different ways, but no matter what, anytime someone enters that email is stored. locally, just obviously, so you can contact him if at their winner, but, it's optional whether or not they can sit into your, email list. like I said, that's kind of a, an option there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:26] Is that a, is that consent like a double opt in, is that consent achieved through an email, which then they click a link on or is that something they tick a box on, on the, on the widget.
There's
John Turner: [00:16:35] a box that they can tick and say, you know, I want to opt in to this newsletter specifically. So, like I said, that's something that people can play with depending on where they live. But obviously if you need to comply with GDPR, then you would need to enable that. So they're not automatically sent to your email newsletters.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:55] Yeah, I've noticed I'm forms plugins. So for example, gravity forums, or in your case, WP forms. th there's a lot of, concern about storing things like emails in the WordPress database, and, you know, people are . Slightly concerned that they don't want to be caught out and hacked and, you know, have to go, go out and contact all these people. Is there any kind of automated or perhaps even more manual way that you can expunge these emails after you've, after you've dealt with them and, you know, you've, you've, you've sent them off to the, the third party autoresponder and so on.
John Turner: [00:17:25] Yeah, yeah. You can delete them out and stuff like that. So, yeah, you can get rid of them and be done with it and then not have to worry about it anymore.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:32] Okay. so I'm looking over at the RafflePress.com website and, first of all, let's, let's tackle the pricing cause that always, that's always the, I mean, sure. It always, it's always the way, isn't it? You look at some kind of, analytics software. Where do they go first? They go to pricing straight away right. So, let's, let's talk about that. we are recording this in September of 2019 and so, as with all things caveat emptor, the pricing may very well have changed, but where are we at as of today?
John Turner: [00:18:02] Sure. So right now it starts at $39 and goes all the way up, to, right now one 59. And that's if you want it on a yearly basis. And we are running a limited time lifetime offer, which will basically is just a one time payment is for three 19. And you own the plug in for life. which is kinda cool cause some people don't like to, have a plugin that they have to renew every year. So. So we've, we've run in that right now and we've seen a lot of interest in that because, you know, we're a new product and people are wanting to lock in that price early. So, that's something we've had a lot of, you know, a lot of interest in.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:37] Yeah. So if we, the, the price points, obviously there are so. As at this moment, there's four, four price points. You've got the plus, which is the 39. You got pro 79 growth, one five nine and the the ultimate is the lifetime on at three 19. Let's start with the plus. What are the, what are the things that you get with that, that are different to the other plans? It looks to me from where I'm sitting that, it's like basically your single site license. You can do it on one site.
John Turner: [00:19:02] Correct. You can run it on one site and you can do things like verify the email, you get access to all the actions, basically, every action that we have there and then you can export your entries and do some design options and run multiple prizes and stuff like that. And then as you work your way up, it gives, it basically tears out the feature. So the next one gives you more sites and give you the email integrations and the polls and surveys and, and mandatory actions, which is kind of a cool feature if you're not familiar with that. Basically what you can do is set an action. For example, like join my email on this list is mandatory, and then after they click on that, they'll get bonus actions they can do to get more entries. So, yeah, it's kind of a cool feature. And then, we get repeat actions, which less than do something every day and come back. And that kind of gets people coming back to your website, you know, and, and, and doing stuff. And then we've got submitted image, which we is actually coming out today. So that's a feature that was coming soon and basically is, is re released today.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:03] Okay. We'll come onto those in a minute, but then, then we've got the, the it called the growth, that one five nine you've got some more features in there as well.
John Turner: [00:20:11] And that that has our refer a friend, which is basically lets them share it on social media platforms like Facebook and stuff. And then. It's kind of a viral loop and it gets people coming back to your website and then they refer other people. And then we've got social login so they can log in with their Facebook instead of entering their email. And, we've got our Zapier and a, a giveaway landing page. If they don't want to, embed it in a poster
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:37] Each of those is a, so the plus the pro and the growth, they're all a yearly subscriptions. And then if you step up to the three 19 as it is at the moment, you get the lifetime lifetime support, lifetime updates, and it says unlimited sites and so on and so forth. Speaking of the number of sites now, a lot of the people that listen to this, they buy plugins and they buy multiple site licenses. and the endeavor there is to, is to be able to pitch that. Product that service as a an offering to a client. So I'm just wondering if the, if the licensing model that you've got allows for them to, to install this on a, on a third party client website.
John Turner: [00:21:13] Yep. They can install it on a third party, a client website, but we do have some things like. You know, the client does not get the support, you know, the, the person that owns the license getting access to the support and the member area and stuff like that. But they can certainly use it on client sites. And then we also have, a nice, affiliate program so they can, you know, sell it to their client as. You know, a value added service and then get a, some revenue from mine as well.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:38] Okay? So the way that you're going to find out about that pricing is you just go to RafflePress.com/pricing but I'm gonna kinda kind of get into the weeds of what the plugin actually does now, you know, so, okay. We've installed the plugin, we've decided that we're going to give away a fabulous prize. We're going to give away one of them and so on. I'll just let you to talk us. True. I know that's difficult in a podcast. There's nothing to actually see and it's very much a visual thing that's going on. But nevertheless, what do we, what is the process that we go through in order to actually set up a contest? What steps does your wizard, if you like, guide us through?
John Turner: [00:22:12] Sure. So the first thing you do is when you install the plugin, it will ask you to, you know, create a giveaway. And then on the giveaway page, we have predesigned templates. So you can do like a basic giveaway, like, which is basically blank, and you add your own. Actions, or you can do a Facebook, a prelaunch, Twitter, and those will automatically add actions, based on those goals, to the giveaway that you can customize. But excuse me, for example, if you just create a basic giveaway, a lot of people would do like, you know, visit on Facebook, follow our Twitter account, watch this video, maybe join our newsletter. And, those are sort of the more common ones there. And, but as soon as super simple, we have a, basically a drag and drop visual builder. So you click on it, adds it, and you add in your options. You can see everything in real time. And it's, is frankly one of the easiest builders. I mean, that was our goal is to make it super easy to use. If you've used any other platforms, sometimes it can get a. Over overly complicated cause they have so many options. We've tried to limit the options and just make it super easy to build a giveaway and get it up and go on as quickly as you can.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:23] So how do we then, so we've been through the process of setting up, you know. Give it a name. We've decided on a prize. We've, we've ticked the boxes, which I'd like to come back to in a minute. Actually tick the boxes for what it is that we want to actually display as part of that entry process. How do we, how do we actually get the giveaway on our WordPress website? Is this like a shortcode type thing? Is there a widget or something.
John Turner: [00:23:47] Sure. So we have a publish page and it gives you three options. You can put a short code in, or you can, if you're using Gutenberg, you can add a Gutenberg block to your site or to your page. So if you're on a post, you can hit plus block and he'll say RafflePress. And. You select your giveaway and I'll add it there. A lot of people who have switched over to Gutenberg, which is kind of nice, or you can create a stand alone, landing page. And that lets you just decide a URL. Like for example, if you're, you know, example.com you can create a URL called iPad slash giveaway R dash giveaway. And then when people visit that, it'll be. A distraction fee free giveaway page as opposed to embedding on your, Oh, your website. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:29] Do you get the, do you get the ability, cause I know that our audience will want to know, do you get the ability to kind of customize this if you've got a ability to, I dunno, tap into the CSS in some way and fiddle with it, in, in the, in the UI as opposed to trying to figure out what the selectors all are.
John Turner: [00:24:44] Yeah, we do have a several design options for the standalone giveaway, like the background image and the colors and the fonts. and, and you can add custom CSS. But again, we tried to keep it simple and limit that. And of course, if you're embedding on the website, it'll take. You know, your websites look and feel.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:01] Yeah. Rivals services that I've used before that, you know, do a similar, have a similar purpose to, to RafflePress. One of the, one of the things that they've got in, and I don't know if this is the case for Russell press, is they've gotten kind of got these . Predesigned workflows. So for example, if the purpose is, is just to gain an email list, then ghost go down this route. But if your purpose is to, I don't know, bolster the, the audience to your Facebook page, go down this route. or if your purpose is to shift a physical product, go down this route. And to be honest with you, because I've only ever done it. The one kind of option. I've never really explored those, but I wondered if RafflePress had got different kind of workflows and different routes that they encourage you to go down.
John Turner: [00:25:43] So basically what we have is basically what I was talking about. When you start the giveaway, we have templates that will give you a goal and you click on that and then it will automatically add actions. To the giveaway, that you can configure from there to, to achieve that goal.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:00] Okay. So looking on your website, I've just actually found you've got things like the classic giveaway, the grow your email list. Give away, refer a friend, grow your Facebook page. So exactly what I've seen elsewhere. It turns out that's a nice coincidence. Grow your YouTube channel. So in what ways are they subtly different? So the, so the, the different configuration of, of actions, how do they let, let's say for example, we did a . Grow your email list as a, as opposed to grow your YouTube channel. How do they look different when you finish?
John Turner: [00:26:28] Sure. So it's just going to add different actions to the giveaway. So for example, grow your YouTube channel, you'll, it'll add, like, watch a video and then, it'll have like, You know, join your, or subscribe to your you YouTube channel as opposed to join your newsletter. We'll have the join your newsletter, give away and maybe follow us on Twitter and stuff like that. So it's just different actions that they can do, to, to, get entries for your giveaway.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:52] One of the things that always fascinated me, and I've never followed up on this, is with some of these actions, it's asking you to perform a particular task. So let's say for example, the task is, follow me on Twitter, you know, so follow at whatever on Twitter. it does the system kind of figure out if that action has actually been performed, you know, does it? Yeah. In some way, pinging Twitter or, you know, notify, get notified by Twitter. Yeah, this is legit. It really has happened. Or can the system, are you relying on a bit of trust and people not to game it quite so much?
John Turner: [00:27:23] Sure. So, we verify where we can. So for Twitter specifically, those are verified through the API. So if you enter a username that is not following, you know, RafflePress, for example, it'll say, sorry, this isn't following RafflePress and it won't give you the in, the entry. But, If, if we can't verify it, then every entry is stored and what they've replied to is stored. So if they're selected as a winner, you can manually verify it as well. but like I said, we try to verify where possible.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:54] Okay. So, you know, at the point where you've selected your winner, if, if any suspicions are raised, you can see what it is that they've claimed to have done. And right by going, you know, spend a little bit of time manually checking, Yeah, you can weight these different actions as well. So for example, you might wish to say, I would like, I really, really would like a Twitter followers, and so instead of getting one, one extra entry, I'm going to call it a point, I don't know if points is suitable, but instead of getting one point, you could bump that up to say five points and thereby kind of encouraged people down that path.
John Turner: [00:28:28] Exactly. And that, you know, statistics, statistically gypsy basically gives them a better chance of winning. So if you have an action that you really want to take, obviously you want to weight that higher. Then an action that's not as important to you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:40] Now the list, this is one of the things that really got me kind of sitting upright when I looked at this plugin a few weeks, well probably months ago now, that I felt it first came across my radar, was the number of actions because the platform that I'm using at the moment is, it's much, much more limited than this. And I'd like us to dwell on, well, actually to go through them all one at a time, if possible, to, you know, to discuss what they do. and what's available.
John Turner: [00:29:08] Yup, absolutely. go ahead. I'll let you start it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:11] Okay. So the one that I'm looking at on your, website, and I, I don't know if this, list is exhaustive. I, in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not, you've selected on the RafflePress website is a demo, probably so as not to, you know, over overall Ross, you've got eight possibilities and the first of which is just simply labeled automatic entry. Now that one puzzles me. I don't really know what that means. Sure.
John Turner: [00:29:34] So, By default, when you enter the giveaway, you're not giving an actual inner, I mean an entry unless you do something. So for example, do an action. So some people want to give entries just for simply entering the giveaway. And that is a way to do that. So basically as soon as they enter their email, they get, Hey, you get, you get your entered. Right.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:57] So, yeah. Yeah. Well that's actually really straightforward. Okay, so the next one is visit, visit such and such. It says RafflePress, but I presume it means visit anything you like on Facebook. I guess it literally is measuring a click and seeing, did you, did you actually bother to open that up.
John Turner: [00:30:16] Yeah. And so we'll kind of group these. So we have, so for the social media ones, you know, typically you want people to. Follow you or, you know, visit that site. So Facebook and Instagram are kind of tricky cause they recently upgraded, updated their terms and they don't let you, you know, before, about six months ago or so, you could say you have to like this to get an entry. Now you can't say that because of the term. So we say visit Facebook and then after they visit your page. We show a light button, but it's optional. It's not required to comply with their terms and Instagram the same thing. You can't make people. Follow you. So we say visit, you know, we encourage them basically to follow you by, you know, say, visit and, you know, follow is optional. Okay? Now, Twitter, you can still, require them to follow you. And that's what we do. We verify that. Pinterest. for example, visit YouTube channel when they visited, it automatically shows the subscribe button. So they just ha just have to click it and stuff like that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:20] Okay. So where possible, you're following up where we're not, you can't.
John Turner: [00:31:24] Well. Yeah. And we're just complying with every third party and trying to play by the rules. basically. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:31] Okay. So the, the next one we've talked about, which is the Twitter follow, visit YouTube channel, I suppose, is exactly the same as the visit Facebook. So, yeah, this is an interesting one. Yeah. Because for me, this is already ticked. So this, this must be an action which I've already taken. So I'm just going to go off on a tangent for a moment. Presumably, you're setting a cookie, which is keeping a track of what it is that I've already achieved. Because for me, out of your eight points, I can see one, two, three, four, I've done four of them. I've already achieved four of them. So presumably that's how you're doing it.
John Turner: [00:32:04] Yeah. So basically, we are. Storing the entries in the backend, and then we store a cookie so that if you enter the giveaway and come back two days later, you don't have to re log in to see what you've, done. You can just, it automatically is, shows you what you've done until you log out, basically. Okay. And, yeah, so it just makes it easier, especially if you're running a, something that somebody can do on a daily basis, they can just come back. They don't have to do anything. They just click do the action again and they get more entries.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:36] Yeah. I can see the, the, you know, if you were seriously interested in gaming the system, at this point, you could clear your cookies and you know, but it's not going to go into the same account. Presumably it's going to set up a different entry in the table and a, so you increase your chances. But as a whole, widespread bunch of users, not just one user as well, which is kinda interesting. Okay. okay, so join an email. Newsletter was the next one, and that one for me is tick, so I'm okay. has that measured my, my actually joining the newsletter or was it, you know, in other words, did I click a double opt in or is that simply, yeah, you press submit on an email address.
John Turner: [00:33:13] Yeah. So you, you can hit submit. we do have the option for somebody to click a double opt in there. but like I said, you can, that particular action has three different options. You can run it when somebody signs up for the giveaway, so it automatically triggers it. Or you can have them click the button as an action, you know, after they enter. Yeah. And then in, in addition to that, you can also have them. click a check box as well to say that they, you know, they're, they're consenting to receive email.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:42] Got it. I've run into a problem with this one, not unruffled press, but on a rival service before, and that is this refer a friend option. There's viral option. whereby there is the option to share a link and it's a unique link with a, you know, a sort of query at the, a string at the end, which is specifically set for you. and people in the past on the platform that I have used, assumed that by just spraying out a bunch of emails to their list, they would then have accrued, like, let's say they've got an email list of 5,000 people, they assumed that would gain them 5,000 versions know entries. but the platform in this case, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. If somebody has got to actually take an action on that link before you're credited with that, how does it work with a RafflePress?
John Turner: [00:34:25] Yes. So, the same here. And, and to comply with a lot of other services, you have to make it that way so for example. Facebook, you cannot share something in exchange for entry. So basically you can share the giveaway, but the entries aren't assigned until someone signs up for the giveaway. So if user a refers user B, then user a sees the, the, the entries from that. So it's just a way to keep it fair and plus it doesn't, do, you know, it just, it's more benefit to you to get more people as opposed to them just sharing it out.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:59] Yeah. So, so just to sort of paraphrase that, if you send out to 5,000 people and three of them take an action on that, you're credited with three. Yeah. Okay, great. Okay. Now this one, I think since spired, watch a video now I'm interested in this, cause I, I. Do make a fair bit of video content. so how does this work do that? Is this like a YouTube URL? Do they get the credit as soon as the video is launched and have to watch to halfway through, or how does that work?
John Turner: [00:35:28] So right now, it only supports YouTube. So you enter the, you a YouTube URL and then they are only a credited with the, entry after the video finishes. So they have to watch it all the way through.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:40] Yes. Great. I really inspired. Yeah. I just think that's such a lovely addition. not something I'd seen before. I don't know if it's on other platforms, but, okay. The next one I can see his Twitter message so. You click on this and you get the option to, put the URL of the tweet in and click the tweet button so you can sort of, you, you create your tweet and then you come back and say, look, here it is. Here is the URL of the tweet that I created right.
John Turner: [00:36:05] Yup. Yup. And, and the tweet, a message can be free form. So you can just say, you know, tweet any message about our company, or you can put in a specific message that you want them to tweet out.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:15] Okay. Yeah. that's great. Again, another bit of genius idea. I like that. The only other ones that I can see on the websites, that is to say, not on the, the demo page that you've got up, I'm now looking at your landing page. The. Dot com yes. Slash nothing page is you've got the option to ask a question. and again, is that like a multiple choice? Okay. Is there a freeform text field or.
John Turner: [00:36:39] So right now it's free form text. A multiple choice is coming, pretty soon. But, some places. So this, this is like, you know, you can ask like, where, where did you hear about us? Or something like that. And also you can use it as a skillset, a test. So in some places. to, to have a giveaway, be legal. I cannot do, there has to be a skills test. So you can say like, you know, what color's the sky? And basically that just gets around their levels so that the giveaway is valid. Right, right. But, yeah. But that, that's basically for collecting information. And again, like if you want somebody phone number, you can make that a required our, their address, our, it's just a way to collect informations from the visitors.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:21] Okay. all right, so the next one is visitor page. So rather than going off to Facebook, you could encourage them to look at something on your own website. That's nice.
John Turner: [00:37:28] Yep. Any page. Yep. Yep.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:30] And there's this mysteriously entitled, invent your own. Now not having any insight into the backend of the plugin. I don't even know where that would leave me. What, what does invent your own? Let me do.
John Turner: [00:37:42] Sure. So basically what that does is let you, Invent your own. So let's say for example, we want them to leave a comment on a post. So we don't have that as a specific action right now. But what you could do is say, you know, please leave a comment on this post and add the URL, and then, you can explain what they need to do to confirm it. And then, And the confirm action, you would have them post the link to the comment. And that way you can create stuff that is not necessarily part of the plugin, but, you know, it just gives you a way to have them do actions that aren't pre-baked into the plugin.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:18] Right. I get it. So it's a like a, you get them to do something and then you get them to prove that they've done it in some fairly straightforward, simple way. That's good. Exactly. Yeah. one of the things that I notice on your version, and it clearly this is how you would do it, is you've got your own branding at the bottom of the, the widget, which by the way is like a tall rectangle. That's how the widget is designed, is that, I know that's going to come up cause it always does is, is the branding removable to people who've got a current license. Get that, possibility.
John Turner: [00:38:50] Totally. Yup. You can remove that. And then, if you're part of our affiliate program, you can, if you want to keep it there, you can enter your affiliate URL and then anybody that's, clicks on that link and ends up purchasing the plug and you'll get a cut from it as well. So, but if you don't want it at all, you can just click a button and it'll take it off.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:08] Yeah. I'm just wondering if you could give us, apart from the, the WP beginner, success story that you had at the beginning, have you, now that this plugin is reaching a certain level of maturity, has, have you heard about some nice success stories? Obviously, you know, you don't have to mention any names, but is it living up to the, the dream that you had for it when you. You know, you went through the incubator and decided to go all in on it.
John Turner: [00:39:33] Yes, we have. We've had, I mean, it's fairly new plugin. It's only been out a couple of months, a couple of months. Sorry. but we are actually about to do a bunch of black Friday stuff with it. So, we've got some big plans for it, but I've had a lot of other people using it, a lot of big companies in WordPress that bought it and are using it right now. So. we're just now starting to get back data. But like I said, if you'd run it properly, then you will get results from it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:58] The other thing which I know will be asked is tell us about the, the roadmap, you know, if we were to buy it. we're also buying its future, not just this present. Do you have any insight into things that you've got? nobody's gonna nobody's gonna keep you to this, but any notion of what might be coming in the near future.
John Turner: [00:40:17] So right now the biggest things is just making it, work with no bugs. We don't want, we want you to install it and basically it just work as far as features. The next thing to come out is submit an image, which is coming out today. And then we've got polls and surveys coming out in the next few weeks, which will basically let you serve a year audience. And it will present a nice graph to you on, on the answers that they've submitted. So again, if, if one of your, maybe you pull people to say, where did you hear about us? That will give you, basically a summary of all the answers. so you can see that in the background. Yeah. we're also working on some more GDPR updates, so it'll be coming out. So while a consent is, Is one of the requirements. We also want to make sure people can scrub data and not collecting IP addresses. So we just want to make sure that it's, that it works for everyone, where they live and meets all their, local laws.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:17] Are you, are you personally, are you full time on this now, or is this, you know, part of a wider set of things that you're working on?
John Turner: [00:41:24] yeah, this is full time.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:25] Yes. Nice. just you.
John Turner: [00:41:28] So it's me. and Syad is, my cofounders Syad, runs, also motive and WP beginner and is also cofounder and, WP forms and optin monster. And a lot of those other companies.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:39] I mean, it's got a, definitely, you've got a lot of, marketing weight behind it. I think it's fabulous. I'm going to give you the floor. I've asked you everything that I, I think I need to, to get to get us today, if that's all right. So I'm going to be the floor. Any Twitter handles and email addresses, anything you want to say? It's a, it's over to you.
John Turner: [00:41:56] Yeah, sure. So you can visit us on RafflePress.com which you've already mentioned, and on RafflePress.com as well. We've got some great guides. So if you scroll down to the bottom of raffle, press.com there's a few guides down there that help people get started. Or just give them, you know, guidance. Cause, the biggest thing is we don't want you to get the plug in and not know what to do next. So we've got, several articles. One is on how to create an online contest, which basically walks you through the process and it's the beginner's guide of how to run a successful giveaway. And then we've got proven contest ideas and, over a hundred own that you can try. So if you're not sure what to give away, these are. Ideas for you. And then we also have a promotion ideas. So, ways to promote your contest and get the word out. So, you can check those out. again on our blog, just go to raffle, press.com and scroll down to the bottom and you can see some quick links down there. And then on Twitter, we're RafflePress and on, Facebook where, facebook.com/RafflePress. So, yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:42:56] Great. Thank you very much. Thank you Johnson for coming on today and talking to us. I really appreciate it.
John Turner: [00:43:02] Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Nathan.
Well, there you go. Thanks to John Turner for coming on and talking to us today.
All about RafflePress. As I say, it's a plugin that I can personally recommend because I'm using it to [email protected] forward. Slash. Win. If you get there before the 8th of January, 2020 there are some WP forms licenses up for grabs, so you might want to go to, so that WP Builds.com forward slash win and yeah.
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