PunchTab: The Rewards Program For Your Blog + A Giveaway!

While I was Googling for some giveaways to participate into, I stumbled upon a giveaway post. I noticed it has a different way of gathering your entries. The typical way to enter blog giveaways is to provide your entries on the comments section of the post. Having so many entries will probably clutter your post, especially if all comments are shown by default. (I have even seen hundreds of entries on one page!) However, this giveaway I entered is using PunchTab to gather and manage entries; and it's been as smooth as shooting your mail on the mailbox (using your imagination perhaps).

But then I discovered that PunchTab isn't just only for managing giveaways. There's also this loyalty program they called (first I've seen on the web!) where you can reward your loyal readers and visitors by doing the things they are already doing. See that Rewards ribbon on the lower left corner of this blog? Yes, it's part of the plan. It's waiting for you. *evil grin*

I know you're excited to know what this is all about so I'll show you now.

What are points? How do I earn points? What can you I do with these points?

Points are what you earn by doing simple activities on a website or a blog. Certain actions have their respective amount of points to be given when you do the actions.

To be able to earn points, you first need to connect PunchTab on your Facebook account or register directly on PunchTab.com.

You could earn points by:

• Visiting the website/blog. You earn 100 points per day of visit. That means you could earn 700 points a week by just the daily visits.
• Liking the website/blog on Facebook and recommending posts. You earn 300 points per action by doing so.
• Commenting on a blog post. A comment a day amounts to 300 points. That means if you provide atleast a valuable comment a day for a week, you'll get 2100 points!
• Tweeting a blog post. 
• Many ways to get points are to come! PunchTab is currently dissecting ribbons on their labs to provide new ways to reward users. I'm staying tuned, and so should you too.

Now the most interesting part...

What can you do with these points?

The administrator of the site has the ability to enter their desired prizes for their readers. But, the good thing is -  there is a default list of prizes where PunchTab and their partners will provide for you. That means you ain't spending a dime for these prizes. 

The prizes are located on the Catalog tab. The default prizes are a $15 Amazon Gift Card worth 10,000 points, a $5 iTunes Gift Card for 5,000 points, and a $3 Starbucks Gift Card for 3,000 points. My favorite (as always) is the Amazon Gift Card where you could purchase just anything from the Amazon store. I'll repeat, PunchTab and its partners will provide these prizes to your readers for you. And they're too generous for a gift card amounting to $15 - that's like one record of your favorite music artist!

On the other hand, you can also provide your own prizes. But you need to provide them by yourself. You cannot append your prizes to the default ones; instead they will be replaced by your customized prizes. But hold on, there are lots of things you can reward your avid readers - domain name, gift cards, software downloads, premium membership, license keys; there are just endless rewards you can think of.

As an administrator, you can track the most active users on your blog via the Leaderboard. 

Of course you can customize where the ribbon should be located:

I've requested on their feedback/users page that we should be able to change the color of the ribbon so it could blend well with our template. You can vote it here.

EDIT: I've received a feedback, you can customize the look of the ribbon by editing its CSS (how could I not think of that!?) Here's the link.

Also, another awesome thought: If we all install PunchTab on our blogs, especially those you often participate into, we could gather pools of prizes on a short length of time! (Who doesn't want freebies? Much more if there'd be tons of freebies?)

So let's hop into the giveaway. This is just a mini-giveaway - a $5 Amazon Gift Code. Whoever is gonna win it will be able to add it to their $15 Amazon Gift Card if they've redeemed it - for a total of $20 worth of Amazon products of their choice.

By the way, here's what this giveaway looks like on the administrator page. 

You can easily view the entries, you need not to count them manually like what most giveaway providers used to do before.

The giveaway ends on June 30th. 

The Amazon gift code on this giveaway will be provided by me.

UPDATE! Congratulations to our winner, Kent from MyNetGadget! (Read More...)

---

UPDATE! I've decided to include here a list of blogs with PunchTab installed. If you have installed PunchTab, please feel free to comment below with your blog URL so I could add your blogs here. ☺

PunchTabbers: Blogs with PunchTab

UPDATE: To reduce redundancy, I've merged the blogs to L-I's Blogroll page. Those blogs with PunchTab will have an red ribbon icon on them:

Visit the Blogroll page.

UPDATE: I was asked - "What would make a good reward for international users?"

I think the gift cards from Amazon are a perfect reward for int'l users as they have a wide variety of products, and they ship internationally. Gift cards from Book Depository is also cool as they ship worldwide for free.

Other awesome rewards for international readers:

• Gift certificates for software products, or license/product keys.
• Free points/items on popular online games esp. MMORPG.

I also think it would be cool if prizes vary for the type of the website where PunchTab is installed.

For instance, it is installed on a Mommy blog, that Groupon gift card would be useful to their readers, and other coupon codes for mommies.

For a tech blog, the above example (software, game points, etc.) would fit.

For music blogs, the iTunes gift card would be a good reward. 

For book blogs, the Book Depository or Barnes & Noble gift card would definitely make their readers excited to gain points.

How about you, our international readers, what rewards would you like to see on PunchTab?

PunchTab is based in Silicon Valley and was founded in January of 2011 by Ranjith Kumaran who previously co-founded YouSendIt.com, and Mehdi Ait Oufkir, an early YouSendIt employee who went on to found JellyDo.com, a location-based reminder service for Foursquare users. Visit PunchTab.com for more info.