Hosting A Giveaway

What are Young House Love giveaways?

We host weekly giveaways that we like to call Fab Freebies. We don’t accept free swag ourselves, and we also don’t accept payment for organizing giveaways. We’re happy to do it all on the house since it’s our way of giving back to our loyal readers (by hooking them up with some pretty cool prizes) while giving businesses a chance to showcase products and services. Each giveaway sponsor is asked to donate a minimum of $100 of product – whether it’s one big prize or several smaller prizes – and ship those prize(s) directly to the winner(s) once the contest closes. Note: priority is given to higher value prizes and those than can ship internationally.

You can browse past giveaways on our Fab Freebie page, or check out some of our most popular ones below:

How does a giveaway work?

Each giveaway gets one dedicated post, which goes live on Monday afternoon around 2pm EST. Readers may enter once per email address by commenting on that post. They’re asked to chime in with a phrase that we designate and are invited to answer a bonus question, both of which are related to the prize. For example, for our rain barrel giveaway we asked readers to say “Rain on me!” and tell us their favorite rainy day activity.

Please note that we can’t require our readers to visit your site, like you on Facebook, or sign up for your mailing list to enter. We like to keep each person’s entry short and sweet (just a blog comment!) so that your giveaway doesn’t become “the annoying one that required a lot of clicks” or “the boring one that only ten people took the time to enter.” We want your giveaway to wrack up as many excited entrants as possible.

Each contest closes two days later at 8pm EST the following Wednesday, or sooner if it reaches our cap of 10,000 entries. We then randomly generate numbers to indicate which comment(s) have won – using a third party site called random.org – and the winner(s) are announced via an update to the original Monday post (and we remind readers to look back as part of a “P.S. note” at the bottom of one of Thursday or Friday’s posts). We also contact those winner(s) to get their shipping information and pass that along to you.

In short: once you’ve provided the information that we’ve requested below, you just have to sit back and watch people get excited.

Who can sponsor a giveaway?

Practically anyone! Brands as large as Home Depot and Target and as small as individual Etsy sellers have all hosted successful Young House Love giveaways. We only ask that your product/company match the spirit of our site: stylish & affordable solutions for designing your life at home. While most giveaways involve home improvement or decor, we’ve also hosted some that focus on children, pets, entertaining, food, and eco-living. However we do reserve the right to exclude any product/company that we feel will be poorly received. After all, we want this to be a positive experience for you and our readers!

How soon will my giveaway go up?

We are extremely backed up with giveaway offers at this time so unfortunately we can’t guarantee a spot for everyone. However, we’d love to add you to our list of offers so that we can try to include you as soon as possible. We schedule our giveaways about a month in advance and in order to maintain a good mix of prizes, giveaways aren’t necessarily scheduled in the order in which they’re received. Again, priority is given to high value prizes that ship internationally.

What do you need to know from me?

There are just four things we need to know. Please shoot all of this info in one email over to john@younghouselove.com.

And if there’s anything else you feel we need to know, just include it in your email to john@younghouselove.com.

What’s in it for me?

Hosting a giveaway on Young House Love is a great way to spread brand awareness and generate website traffic and sales (you can learn more about our expansive audience on our advertising page). Plus you’ll get a post about your company/product to launch the giveaway, where we’ll sing your praises, include your images, and link over to your site. But what does getting your stuff in front of YHL readers really get you? We’ll let our past giveaway sponsors speak for themselves:

When can I schedule my second giveaway?

In the spirit of spreading the love and introducing our readers to as many new products and companies as possible, we’re not currently accepting repeat giveaway sponsors. Exceptions may be made on a case by case basis (for example, sidebar sponsors may be granted a second giveaway thanks to their loyalty and support). If you’ve already hosted a successful giveaway and are coming back for more, you can visit our advertising page to learn how else you can spread the word about your company or product, including both sidebar ads and monthly in-post mentions. Thanks so much for your interest- we look forward to teaming up again soon!