Anna Thurman is a work-at-home mom and blogger. Every week, he researches and reviews the best work from home opportunities on his blog, The real way to make money online.
I started giving gifts as a hobby in 2007. To begin with, I didn’t really have much hope that this would become a profitable hobby, but from the various sweepstakes forums I visited I could see that some people had actually won. In fact, some people were able to win several times per week!
To make a long story short, I paid close attention to how these people were winning — their processes, their specific methods — and applied them myself. Have I ever won big? no But I win a lot of small prizes, and when I try to enter sweepstakes regularly, I almost always manage to snag at least one small prize every week.
The holiday season is fast approaching, and most of us start thinking about gifts and shopping. If money is tight for you, you might consider spending about an hour each day entering sweepstakes to score small prizes for giveaways. Small wins have definitely helped me with gift giving in the past!
Here are five giveaways to help you score some freebies this holiday season:
#1 – Choose a gift resource.
The first thing you need to do is figure out where you’re going to look for giveaways to enter And no, Google is not a good option here. There are several sweepstakes databases online that are regularly updated and well-organized, making it easier to enter the prizes you want.
I personally use Online-Sweepstakes.com. This site seems to have more listings and better organization than other similar sites, but if you want to see all the gift listings, you’ll need to pay for a premium subscription. The premium subscription isn’t expensive ($30 for a year), and if you enter consistently, it should pay for itself multiple times over to win prizes.
If you don’t want to pay, the free option for Online-Sweepstakes.com is still very good. Sweepstakes Advantage is another great site that is 100 percent free to access.
#2 – Focus on small rewards
Let’s face it — the odds of you winning $50,000 before the holidays are slim to none, so there’s no need to rely on it to help with gifts. That doesn’t mean you won’t throw your name in the pot a few times for this kind of prize money, but it’s unlikely to help you in the short term.
The things you should focus on right now are the smaller prizes because your chances of winning are better and these types of giveaways usually end faster — meaning you’ll know sooner if you’ve won something. Here’s an insider tip – enter the blog giveaway! Online-Sweepstakes has a feature that allows you to narrow down the lists to blog giveaways only, and you don’t have to have a premium membership to do this.
Blog giveaways end quickly, have few entries, and often offer great little prizes that make great giveaways. Throughout my sweepstakes history, most of my winnings have come from blog giveaways.
#3 – Nail your “system”.
You need a system. Your chances of winning and winning consistently are better if you approach your new gift hobby in a very structured way rather than just randomly.
For example, my system is to enter giveaways that allow daily entries first. Then, I browse the new gift lists and enter the ones that interest me the most I never waste time entering prizes I don’t want for myself and won’t give as gifts. If a new giveaway allows for daily entries, I add them to my “daily” list so I don’t miss any potential entries.
I limit my access time to about an hour per day. Spending more time than that means burnout for me, and burnout means I stop entering and stop winning. This short time frame often means I don’t get a chance to go through all the new giveaways or enter all my diaries, but that’s okay. This is a hobby, not a job, so there’s no need to push yourself too hard.
#4 – Be very consistent
The key to victory is consistency. You can’t spend time giving a gift on Monday and then not try again until the following week. The simple truth is that if you enter and enter often, your chances of winning are good. If you want to see results, I would recommend spending up to an hour a day, four to five days a week.
If a giveaway offers daily entry, enter the giveaway every day that you can. You need to throw your name into as many virtual “hats” as possible — so enter as many different giveaways. The more “hats” your name is in, the more likely it is to fall out of one of them.
#5 – Practice patience
The primary reason most people never win is because they get discouraged early on and give up. It’s hard to be patient and pass the time when you’re not scoring any rewards. You may even start thinking that you are not lucky enough.
When you first start giving away it’s not unusual to go a few weeks to a month without a win. But I can almost guarantee that if you stick with it longer than that and practice consistency, the wins will start coming. That’s what happened to me, and if you read the forums at Online-Sweepstakes.com or Sweepstakes Advantage, you’ll find that it happens to many other people as well.
People who win and win often are not “just lucky”. There is no denying that luck is a factor, but it is not the only reason that many people are able to win a lot. Those who win often do so because they are persistent, patient and optimistic.
If you start with the tips above today, you have a great chance of winning some and hopefully, some prizes to use for giveaways when December comes around!
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