One minute it was January for a whole decade and then suddenly we’re heading towards Easter and April. This year seems to have been a whole string of themes including Veganuary, St Valentine’s, World Book Day, Chocolate Day, Sleep Day, Mother’s Day, Happiness Day and now Easter. Great for compers as brands and websites have been churning out the giveaways. It’d be nice though if things just eased off a little and give us time to catch our breath a bit. We’re still trying to get the remainder of Loquax moved over to the new platform whilst juggling 1001 other things including companies like William Hill deciding to end our affiliate relationship with zero days notice. Not even a “thanks” after 15/20 years of promotions. Anyway, life goes on and whilst in the comping world everything changes, actually nothing changes.
Hook, Line & Stinker!
It still surprises us after all these years that a site owner or promoter will be astonished to discover people who like winning prizes will look to enter their competition – and some sites really do get the hump about it including raffle style sites. A lot of pay to enter prize draw brands are embracing free prize draws as a tool to firstly get you to visit, potentially register and then possibly see how things work. It might even make you want to spend some money with them. HookIt Competitions aren’t one of those sites. Not only did they request that no one shares their links on Loquax but they also threatened us with legal action if it happened again. We don’t mind that they don’t want to be included in our listings but making legal threats! Laughable, especially when we also review these sites. Talking of reviews, we’ve also heard of another site, Raffleade, withholding a prize won on a free entry draw because the winner was found to not be a paying customer. This was despite their rules not indicating otherwise (and they still don’t). As with all sites it’s hard to know who’s good and who’s not so just be cautious and hope that most realise why competitions and prize draws can be good hooks to get visitors.
Compers In The News
In the last Loquax Update we told you about a new Compers Podcast called “A Little Friendly Competition”. Since that post there’s been a further two episodes released. It’s an interesting listen although if you’ve been on a non-winning streak for longer than two weeks you might want to avoid parts of episode 3. The next episode we believe is about radio comps so that’ll be worth a listen if you’ve ever considered those kind of comps.Elsewhere compers and comping have popped up in the media a couple of times recently. The Telegraph ran an article titled “I enter competitions every day – and I’ve won £77k in prizes” and featured three compers who enjoy comping and winning. Purchase necessary and creative comping do seem to be the key areas for success. However The Sun’s article about Contest Queen, Lyndsey Bruce, suggests that free to enter draws are the way to go. It just goes to show that perhaps there’s no right way or wrong way to be a winner. Well there is a wrong way and if you’re a member of Lucky Learners then there’s some interesting discussions about social media comping cheats there. The discussions mainly focus on Instagram cheating which is good news for us because no one can blame their lack of wins on us for that one.
On The Blog
Over the last month or so we’ve been blogging quite a bit although mainly about pay to enter prize draw sites. The most important of these blogs was titled “Can Pay To Enter Prize Draw Sites Be Fixed“. We monitored ticket sales of one site and noticed that ticket sales jumped rapidly. That can happen as Bounty Competitions recently demonstrated by selling out a win a house giveaway in just 24 hours, but the site doing the fixing is new and has a small audience. Anyway we’ve kept tabs on them since the original blog and they’ve carried on their “fake it until they make it” approach. At the weekend they claimed to create 4 x £50K winners but the draw was done offline due to technicalities. The good news is that the site in question has not gone unnoticed with competitors. They’ve spotted their artwork and even competition formats being stolen. We’ll keep you informed of developments but we have updated our Raffles FAQ to give you more advice on using these kind of sites. Finally we also blogged about subscription prize draw sites such as Good Life Plus and WinMore. You may have heard of the former and/or seen ads for the latter. In our blog we looked at both and weighed up the pros and cons of these services. Do let us know your views in the comments.
Easter Prizes & Competitions
Easter is on the 31st March this year and as mentioned at the top these seasonal events mean there’s plenty of prizes. Our Easter prizes section has been filling up nicely so do drop in and check out the goodies. As you’d expect there are plenty of opportunities to win chocolate prizes. These include a year of Cadbury’s from WHSmith on Instagram (ends 3/4), a year of chocolate from Hamleys (ends 1/4) and an Easter Bundle from After Eight (ends 24/3). If you love Hotel Chocolat products then there’s quite a few eggs and hampers amongst the listings too. As with all seasonal comps don’t put your faith in luck to deliver before the actual date, although scanning through the current list it does seem most will close in time for a potential Easter delivery. However we do expect some more Easter themed fun as we go into the bank holiday weekend (and hopefully a little break for a few days for us). If you are lucky enough to win then do remember to share it on the forums. You just need to head to The Winners Post and let us know what you’ve won!