The comping community is all a buzz at the moment with regards to the latest newspaper articles to feature a successful comper. As ever the headlines scream out the amounts won and the number of comps entered etc. However the big difference to the usual article is that the comper in question has according to The Daily Mail “now given up work to fund her life through contests”.
Super Hard Working Di
The comper in question is Di Coke, who is well known in the comping community. She’s written columns for Compers News, worked for Theprizefinder and has been incredibly successful winning prizes. She has her own blog at Superlucky and works hard to try and educate promoters on running successful comps. She also has plenty of advice for compers, especially for those looking to take part in creative comps. So is she funding her life through entering competitions or funding her life by carving out a career as a competition expert? We’d suggest the latter but then that probably wouldn’t make such exciting headlines or generate as many comments. Di’s success and determination has made her the UK’s leading comping blogger and it’s no surprise her expertise is in demand with the likes of CAP and The IPM. Kudos to Di for doing this – because no one else is!
Career Compers?
The question though is can you fund your life through entering competitions? We’d say that the answer is “no” simply because it’s long hours with potentially zero rewards. In fact the only way you’re going to make a living within comping is by not entering them. Back in 1999 a young Geochemist researcher gave up his career to make a business out of comping. This was featured in the papers – but back in those days social media and viral things weren’t even known about online. A year or two later a Maths Phd Student followed suit, although that didn’t even make the presses. Today the people involved both still run Loquax. Let’s be very clear, although Loquax started off being funded by prizes, we’d not have been able to get this far just relying on wins!! In fact, given the recent history of the site we’d not have been able to sustain our involvement in competitions by having a career solely based around comping. Similar stories can be found at other comping portals – but the situation is always the same – people who may have started life as compers working in comping to earn a living. But most of the cases we can think of off hand very few actually own the company that they’re working for! Jane Willis and Steve Higson are two names that spring to mind though. Up until recently, Jane ran her own magazine whilst Steve, who founded Theprizefinder and sold it to Accolade Publishing, remains with the site as editor 15 odd years later.
What Could You Do?
So if you’re hoping that entering competitions and prize draws is going to be your new job then think again. To make a career out of it you need to provide a service to compers or to people who want to run competitions. If you can code a cool site, think up a useful widget (e.g. Rafflecopter), provide a quality service or blog with style then you never know what lies ahead. Just don’t ever think spending hours each day to win stuff is a career for anyone… even if the papers like to try and say otherwise. Finally we’d like to say good luck to Di with her comping career!!!