I’ve been meaning to start entering competitions for years now. As a child I won three competitions – the first was for a year’s supply of Push pops (remember those?), the second was for two tickets to see The Gladiators being filmed and the third was a colouring in competition in my school. I’ll come clean and admit that this time round I only started entering competitions as research for a blog post.
A few weeks into it, I had my first win. A box of Special K and a pack of cereal bars. Hm. Whilst nice enough, I was hardly getting rich or making any money. But I persevered. And then I won some wine! It was actually for the Retail Royalty challenge that I blogged about, but none the less, I won.
Thirdly, I won a key ring from a crafter/small business owner. I started feeling a little bit guilty. Whilst I don’t mind entering competitions with big companies who can afford such things, winning a key ring from such a small business made me feel slightly uneasy. So there comes the moral dilemma of “comping”. Is it fair to sign up to newsletters, marketing campaigns and “liking” Facebook pages of the companies that I’m probably not interested in? To be honest, I still haven’t decided what my feeling on this are. As a blogger, when I run my next competition, I want to reward my loyal readers, not give a prize to someone who enters semi-professionally. Even more so if it is something a blogger has had to purchase themselves, as opposed to a business.
I continued entering, and then a lovely email landed in my inbox. I tweeted at the time, wondering if it was genuine – and after a quick search on MSE, I discovered that it WAS a competition I had entered. I have won a £3,000 luxury stay with Positive Luxury! I’ve even managed to book it for my birthday in February.
I spend a heck of a lot of time entering competitions. I am embarrassed to admit how much time I spend on them, but over the course of a week, I think I must average two hours a day. This is not a ‘getting rich’ scheme by any means. Don’t let the amount of time that I put into it put you off – even if you’ve just got 30 minutes a week to enter, go for it! I’ve found that I genuinely enjoy it. Many compers say that you need to treat it as a hobby, and I completely agree. I’ve just won some baby food – no, I’m not keeping anything from you – but I’m sure that I can find someone who would appreciate it.
I could spend ages writing a guide for entering competitions, but there is an absolutely fantastic guide over at the MSE forums written by VelvetGlove. The MSE forums are fantastic – you can easily keep track of what you’ve entered by using the ticks and crosses on each post (you do need to be logged in). I would suggest that you set up an email address just for comping. Please keep your wits about you – some websites offer a “prize” for completing around 194,954,123 offers, signing up to mobile offers, etc. You can pick how to enter – I personally sort the MSE Competitions Time forum by “thread start time” within the “last day”, enter all that I want to there, and then move on to competitions ending the following day. If I’ve exhausted all of those (which is rare), then I run an advanced search for prizes I want to win – I really want to win a hamper full of delicious food.
I have decided that entering competitions has been a really great new hobby for me, and I will continue to do so. I am going to limit the blog competitions I enter, and only enter the ones belonging to blogs I already read, or when the prizes have been obviously donated and not come from the blog owner’s own pocket. I’m going to limit the number of Twitter competitions I enter, and once I actually win something, I’ll reevaluate. I don’t normally enter competitions for DVDs, as there’s so little chance of winning, I prefer to enter for something more meaningful. Note how I said ‘meaningful’, not necessarily worth more.
It seems apt to finish this blog post with a giveaway! I’ve got two Amazon gift vouchers to give away – one £10 voucher and one £5 voucher, to two lucky winners. The competition will run from today until midnight on 30th September 2013 and the winner will be announced by Friday 4th October 2013. Good luck.
