Competitions for free

I have been entering competitions for a few weeks now and know that although there are undoubtedly a few tricks useful in raising your profile and tipping the odds in your favour, for the most part it is numbers game. If you only enter one competition, then yes, you stand a one in five thousand chance of winning - or however many competition entries there have been.

Some guidelines for those new to comping as a hobby include sensible approaches such as only entering competitions that you would like to win the prize on. After all, there is no point someone like me who doesn't have children entering a competition to win nappies, so I will leave it to those who want or need the prize instead. Obviously the less people enter a competition, the better your odds of winning; so if you enter competitions with low entrant rates it stands to reason that you have a better chance of winning. These would include competitions that require you to do something, which could be writing a story or poem, taking photographs or a wide variety of other activities. There are examples out there where someone has won a large amount of cash and has been one of only around twenty to enter. You never know - as the saying goes, you have to be in it to win it.

Probably the first thing I would suggest to improve your odds of winning a prize would be to join a comping club. That could be a local meet, but nowadays it is much more likely to be online; social communities such as facebook or twitter usually have comping groups set up. There are also a number of online services that provide links to competitions, such as the prize finder which allows you to just click on a link and be re-routed to the competition site. If you are feeling a little more extravagant and are prepared to spend money, then sites such as Simply Prizes provide an excellent monthly service in the form of a monthly magazine as well as access to their web site. They have around 400 competitions a month, many of which are worth a fair amount of money. Given that the cost of the majority of these services is a lot less than a hundred pounds per annum, this can be earned back very quickly once you start entering - assuming that you are lucky enough to win of course!

Facebook has some quite tough regulations in place that ensure any competitions that are run on there are fair to all involved. Twitter on the other hand appears to have much looser regulations and I have read several blogs by people who have run competitions on there, that tell of the complications that they have faced on Twitter. I have to say that I have won on both, although only the one prize has been on Twitter.

It doesn't matter if the prize offered is a packet of crisps or a diamond necklace, the excitement when you open that email telling you that you have been picked as the winner is fantastic.