If you’re on the fence about what prize to use for your next giveaway, I’ll let you in on a little secret: make the prize kick ass.

Let’s look at why prize selection is so important to your success. We’re going to look back at the giveaways we’ve run over the past four months to give you an inside look at how they were administered, their results, and understand the relationship between the amount of engagement you can drive by giving away a bigger and better prize.

Did your giveaway not perform as well as you’d hoped? Maybe it outright bombed, and you’re left crying in a corner wondering where you went wrong. Teaching moment! I’m willing to bet a little more preparation could have helped you out, so let’s figure out how to change the trajectory of your next giveaway.

Let’s play some word association. If I say wedding, you’ll probably say something like white. If I say baseball, you might say homerun. If I say boy band, you might say N’SYNC. And lastly, if I say giveaway, you’ll probably say winner.

Although winners get all the glory in giveaways, they’re not your biggest asset as a moderator. The losers are.

Today, you’re going to get a behind-the-scenes look at the giveaway promotion strategies we used in a recent giveaway which attracted enough entrants to fill up Madison Square Garden.

It was a busy year on the Rafflecopter blog. 200,000 of you came to visit and see what we had to say about giveaway tips, Facebook promotions, and other marketing advice. A review of the most popular Rafflecopter blog posts reveals some interesting trends that marketers like you were interested in over the past 12 months.

To generate and rank this list we looked at a combination of unique pageviews along with the average time visitors engaged with each post. We then removed any Rafflecopter product focused posts. Here are the results.