Are you looking for a few extra gift cards and goodies in your life? Do you dream of cash, cars, and trips? Perhaps you should try sweeping!
No, I’m not suggesting that you should open your own cleaning service. Sweeping, or entering contests and sweepstakes, is a lot more fun than cleaning someone’s house, and can open the door to opportunities that you otherwise wouldn’t have. Anyone can win, and if you are reading this, that means you have access to a computer, and as long as you have an address to go with that computer access, you can get started.
Where To Enter
If you want to get started with sweepstakes, you have to find the sweepstakes first. You could walk around the mall and try to find entry ballots, and while the odds might be better with local contests, they also might be harder to find. You could watch television to try to find mail-in contests, but that could take a while. The easiest way to get started is to find sweepstakes online. You can use a search engine like google to find sweepstakes, or you can visit a web site that specializes in listing other people’s sweeps.
My favorite sweepstakes website is online-sweepstakes.com, which I have been a member of for more than a year. They offer a free membership, but I have found that their paid premium membership ($30 a year) more than pays for itself. This year alone, I have won enough in prizes to pay for a premium membership for the rest of my life! Well, at least until I’m in my 80s. Other places where you can find sweepstakes listings include about.com and Big$weeps.com.
Types Of Sweepstakes
There are several different types of sweepstakes that you can enter, but I have to note one important thing: you should never have to pay to enter a sweepstakes. Sweepstakes are advertisements, like coupons, and should not charge an entry fee. Contests that require skill are another ball of wax and could require an entry fee, but a legitimate sweepstakes will never ask for money, your bank account number, or your social security number (unless you win a large prize and they need it for tax reporting purposes).
Many sweepstakes are simple to enter. All you have to do is fill out the required information, often consisting of your name, address, age, and email address. It’s a good idea to sign up for a free email account when you start sweeping, and have all your sweepstakes email sent to that. Some sweepstakes will require you to sign up for newsletters or other items that you don’t want clogging up your personal inbox. A separate sweepstakes email will allow you to quickly scan for win announcements and delete the junk.
Some sweepstakes will allow you to know instantly whether you won or not. These instants often involve some sort of flash game where you spin a virtual slot machine, pick a square, or play some small game. In most cases, it doesn’t matter what square you pick or whether you win the game or not, and often you can quickly bypass the game to go directly to the results. These can be fun because you don’t have to wait for months to see whether a prize arrives at your door or not.
Some sweepstakes require you to submit a photo, video, or essay along with your entry. There are also many contests that require you to submit content but are free to enter. These take more time to enter, but often receive fewer entries because people are less likely to bother with them.
A recent phenomenon in the sweeping world is blog sweepstakes. Most of these require that you submit a comment. It is important to read the instructions on these types of sweepstakes, as they might ask you to name your favorite product or make another comment relevant to whatever they are giving away. Some sweepers hate these sorts of contests, but I have found that the odds are pretty good, and I have won several of these contests this year.
Sweeping Tools
Typing your name, address, and phone number over and over and over again is enough to give a sweeper carpal tunnel syndrome! Fortunately, there are form-filling tools that can help a sweeper fill out their information.
Roboform is currently the most popular form-filler out there. It does not work with flash-based web sites, but does work with many of the sweepstakes that you will find. You can also use it to remember user names and passwords from other sites, which can come in handy even when you’re not entering sweepstakes.
For flash-based forms, I have found a little program called Clip Magic to be quite useful. I have to be honest, it was a little difficult to set up, but once I got that accomplished, entering most flash sweepstakes has become a breeze. It is basically a clipboard program that you can program commonly used phrases into your keyboard. I have used Clip Magic to program my keyboard’s function keys to type my name, email address, address, and telephone number at the press of a button, which speeds things along quite nicely.
Sweeping Tips
The main rule to remember when it comes to sweepstakes is if you don’t enter, you can’t win. Enter early and enter often. The more time you spend entering sweepstakes, the more likely you are to win something. Everybody goes through a dry spell where they don’t win anything for a period of time, but in general, the more effort you put into sweeping, the more packages you’ll find sitting on your doorstep.
Read the rules and pay attention to what the entry form is asking for. Make sure that you are eligible, as some sweepstakes are only open to children, or are void in certain states. Find a system of keeping track of what you enter, as some sweepstakes will only allow you to enter once, while others allow you to enter every day or once a week.
Do People Really Win?
Yes, people really do win. In fact, if you enter often and consistently, the odds are pretty high that eventually you’ll win something. Most people see their first wins arriving within 3 to 6 months of sweeping, although I personally won a small ($10-ish) prize in my first week of trying.
While I personally do not know anybody that has ever won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes (because of its popularity the odds are pretty slim), I can tell you from personal experience that you can win big.
This year alone, I won a trip to the American Idol Finale (you can’t even buy an experience like that), a Blu-Ray player, DVDs, Christmas presents for my children, shoes, a Hanes gift certificate, restaurant gift cards, and other small items. I have yet to win a car, but you never know… maybe that is next.
People really do win… and so can you! Just make some time each day to get your entries in, and pretty soon you’ll be hooked!
References:
Roboform: http://www.roboform.com
Clipmagic: http://www.clipmagic.com
