In spite of the recession, or maybe because of it, advertising agencies are inventing some very compelling interactive solutions on the internet, and now there are more online contests than ever before. There are so many web challenges out there today they actually compete with each other to offer better odds and bigger prizes. But as there’s only so much time in a day, it’s hard to know which contests are worth entering, and where and how users can find the best odds?
Here are some tips from a professional,
1. Start with a disposable email address, like gmail or hotmail and use this identity to enter contests. This practice leverages the superior spam filters offered on these services, and prevents more spam from reaching your priority email account.
2. Create a routine and use aggregators and contest index websites to filter through the old and new business quickly and efficiently. I use a site called All Canada Contests which divides hundreds of offerings into regions (provinces) and also by the prizes offered (which is the key to determining odds). No other Canadian website does this. The categories I target are automobiles, cash prizes, electronics, home prizes, travel contests, and photo contests.
3. Avoid million dollar sweepstakes and dream homes. In Canada, the only sponsors capable of offering such prizes are multinational corporations. A Canadian entrant in a contest that’s open to both USA and Canada faces much smaller odds of winning simply because there are millions more potential participants.
4. Carefully read over the rules of the contests you enter as you calculate the odds. For example, contests that are restricted to certain geographical regions or age groups usually offer far more favourable odds.
5. Enter contests that require special skills, as this often eliminates much of the competition. Focus on the hard stuff and get good at short creative writing assignments, Twitter poetry contests, and quizzes. Strategize over photo or video submissions; tasks like this will scare away the bulk of the non professionals and the bar is lowered.
6. Enter contests that offer more than one prize. The odds of winning something are dramatically increased in contests with multiple prizes. Find contests with ‘prize schedules’ where there’s a quota to be dispensed according to demographics – these benefit the consistent entrant who varies his or her routine.
7. Make entering contests easier by using form filler software such as RoboForm. There’s a few different systems, but RoboForm lets users rapidly enter repetitive data (name, e-mail, address and phone number) by using their mouse and clicking prefabricated options. This makes the process much easier and builds your chances of success by increasing the amount of contests you can enter in a day.
As a professional web contest participant your advantage lies in the numbers you can total by working full time. If you can submit applications to one hundred contests a day, you can enter five hundred contests a week, and that’s two thousand chances a month. Anyone entered in two thousand web challenges a month has a reasonable chance of something that’s worth a great deal of money, perhaps as much as a doctor or a corporate lawyer, or an investment banker would have made in the same amount of time.
