Compaholics

A Quick Guide to Comping

Something for nothing. It’s the dream, right? But in reality, you get very little for free in this world. Competitions do allow us to gain something for nothing though, the only investment that you need to make – for the most part – is your time.

There are hundreds of competitions both online and offline running on a daily basis. Some are more lucrative than others, but it’s definitely possible to pick up huge cash prizes, luxury holidays, flash cars, gift cards and even houses!

The process of the majority of them are pretty simple, but there are some key areas that you need to consider to not only stay safe, but also maximise your potential winnings.

1. Choose the Right Competitions

As we’ve already stated, there are so many competitions that you can take part in these days that you simply wont have time to compete in all of them. Whilst they aren’t taxing work to enter, they do take time to fill in your details and also to make you sure you understand the terms and conditions for each entry.

So, how do you know which to enter? Well, we think there are two key brackets for these types of offers.

1. Bigger the better – If you are looking for the big prizes such as luxury holidays, cars, houses and that kind of thing, you need to be targeting the bigger competitions. These are going to be most lucrative and more often than not, even if you don’t win you can often pick up some fairly nice runner prizes as well.But, these comps will have the highest number of entries so they are going to be much harder to win. It will also depend on what’s required to enter the competition as well as to how many entries there are. Answering a simple question is going to attract huge volumes, but something a little more time consuming such as collecting tickets from newspapers will deter people as it’s too much work.
2. Smaller events = more value – The smaller prizes will often appeal to fewer people to actually take the time and enter. For example, a free bottle of shampoo is going to appeal less than a £50,000 cash prize and as a result, fewer people will enter.With these comps you are going to have a much better chance of actually winning something, compared with the example above.

2. Read the Rules

A key point for any entry is to make sure that you understand the rules of the competition before entering. Often they will be littered with terms and conditions that you must adhere to. If you fail to follow the rules, you may not be eligible for the prize, even if you win! As well as being a huge disappointment, you would have just been wasting your time.

A common mistake that people fall into is taking the pictures that are advertising the competition as what you are going to win. For example, the competition might be to win a car, with the image of the car being of a Ferrari. You’d be forgiven in thinking that this the car that you would win if you won the comp, when actually the terms might read that you actually get a Ford Fiesta instead. It’s still a good prize, but it’s no Ferrari, that’s for sure!

There may be things that you need to do in order to enter the comp as well, such as confirm your ID or even have to ring in and manually enter your entry for the comp.

You’re also going to need to make sure that you know if the company is legit or not. It’s pretty easy to do and a few places that you can check are on Companies House website and also check the address to make sure it’s an actual place and not just a PO Box. If it is the latter and you cant find any other info on the company, alarm bells should be ringing. There are also a number of forums and online sites that help in making sure you are safe when entering any comp.

3. Will I get spammed?

One of the main reasons that companies set up these competitions is to get data about you and also access to things such as email addresses and phone numbers so they can follow up with marketing offers. It is possible that you will get spammed from some operators, but if you see spammy emails or something that doesn’t interest you, then by law all emails of this type will have an unsubscribe button, so just hit that on anything you don’t like.

There are ways around this though and many seasoned ‘comp’ers’ actually have separate emails and even phone numbers for these types of offers. This way it keeps everything away from your private emails and allows you keep track of any potential winnings.

But, if you think anyone has gone over the line or are excessively abusing your personal data then you can get in touch with the likes of the Advertising Agency and OFCOM who will be able to help you further.

4. Don’t get disheartened

To see any long term success with these comps you need to really be looking long term and it might take hundreds or even thousands of attempts before you win anything. If you think that some comps might get over 100,000 people entering, this means that you are essentially a 1 in 100,000 chance of winning that comp or to put into English, unlikely!

Many people become disheartened pretty quickly with these comps and so they just give up. The only way to increase your chances of winning one is to increase the number of comps that you can enter.

Below we have listed a number of tools and strategies that you can apply to help increase your chances of winning a comp.

Tools and Strategies

1. Utilise the Forums

The competition industry is booming these days and so are the number of people who partake in them. As a result there are many forums where players will post up of upcoming and running comps, giving you a great heads up as to what to enter.

As these forums are becoming business of their own, you will also find that the companies running the comps will actually post up on these boards as well. In fact, some comps are run exclusively for forum members as a thank you to allowing them for advertising space, so it’s well worth being a part of these communities.

A forum is something we’re planning on adding to the new Compaholics site, but in the mean time we highly recommend the forums over at Money Saving Expert.

2. Track Your Entries & Results

If you start to really take these competitions seriously, then you are going to be entering a heck of a lot of comps. You need to not only track the comps that you’ve entered but also potential winnings and then mark off with actually winnings, if any.

A simply Excel spread sheet will do the trick! It’s also likely that many of the comps that you enter will be drawn weeks or even months down the line from when you entered, so try and set up a system where you highlight upcoming draws.

Probably the most important part of it all though, is following up on draws that you have entered and already been made. It might be the case that the company offering the prizes makes very little effort to contact the winners in hope that they cant be reached and then don’t have to be paid out. As you are likely going to be inundated with emails, make sure you check spam folders and even missed calls on your phone from unknown numbers. The best thing to do is just to contact them directly or at worst, check their website for winners.

TIP: Di Coke from SuperLucky.me has a nice comping template for you to use. You can grab a copy on her website here.

3. Auto-fill Tools

One of the best timesavers for entering comps is that of the auto fill tools you can get on browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari and FireFox. They recognise what info needs to be entered in the box and instead of you having to fill in each section, you simply click the auto-fill button and it does it for you.

You can even edit the boxes within the browser for different info. So it could include name, address, telephone number and email address. You will be surprised how much time these things could save you, especially if you are entering a high number of comps per day.

4. Make the Effort

Some comps will take a matter of seconds to enter and it will attract thousands on players as a result. But, some will make you work hard to win, such as take a picture or draw something. It often doesn’t have to be professional quality, they just want to see some diversity for their competitions.

The majority of people will swerve these, so take the time to produce your best work and send it in. Who knows, you might be the only person to do so!