Hello everyone! How was your weekend, any nice wins to report? A few December wins here, including a selection of body building powders and accessories (!) from the MultiPower advent comp and some walnut whips and a bubbly chocolate Santa from the M&S Pass the Parcel game. But my favourite prize this month so far has to be the Kindle Fire HD I won on a Facebook competition with Speed Property Buyer. I was chosen at random from over 20,000 entries, so am rather chuffed with this win! Not managed to get tons of advent comping in yet – been too busy with work, school Christmas activities and having fun as a family at the weekend. I am planning to have a concerted comping session at some point this week, so keeping everything crossed! How are your wins coming on for December - do let us know, we love to hear from you!
To really get the most out of your comping this time of year, we really need to be organised. There are so many wonderful competitions out there that sometimes you can feel overwhelmed. My Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of competitions that I would love to enter, but I get side-tracked with other things. When you are using The PrizeFinder however we give you a whole range of tools to help you manage your time and get the most out of your comping.
As a registered member of The PrizeFinder you can fully customise the way we show you competitions by using the “Customise Listings” feature. To access the “Customise Listings” section of the website, you need to be logged into your account - once you are, you will see a blue box on the top right of the screen, next to the “My Account” button. From the Customise listings section, you can easily tell The PrizeFinder how you would like your competition listings displayed.
Number of results to display in prize listing
First off, you can specify how many results to display in each page of your prize listings – ranging from 10-50. Some people like a long list of prizes to enter all in one go, giving them fewer pages to work through overall. Others like to have lots of short pages to work through in smaller, bite-sized chunks. The choice is yours!
Number of days to check ahead for closing competitions
Next, you can customise how many days you ask The PrizeFinder to look ahead for Competitions closing. This means you can see at a glance which competitions close on which date. For me, this allows me to manage my time better – I like to enter competitions as close to closing as possible, and if I can see in advance that a specific date has more comps closing than another (usually at the end of a calendar month) then I will manage my time to make sure I have extra comping time on that date. Again, you can specify a range of between 10-50 days ahead. Some people like to see a long time range in advance, others like to concentrate on a week or so in advance – all down to personal; preference again.
Number of days ago to mark competitions as new from
The next drop down menu specifies how long ago to mark a competition as “New” from. If you are checking the site every day then this is probably best left as “1”, as you can see the new comps that have been added since yesterday. However, if you only get on every few days, you can change this to suit how often you access the site.
Ordering
The next drop down tells The PrizeFinder how you like your listings ordered – by date added, closing date, alphabetically by website name or by prize. This is useful when you are browsing prize categories, such as Home & Garden or Holidays and, for example, you want to enter all the competitions hosted on a certain website in one go. Similarly if you want to enter al the comps ending on a particular date in a sub-category (e.g. holidays, or kids & toys), then you can organise your listings to help you.
Tick Boxes
Underneath these drop down menus is our range of tick boxes. Firstly, once you have visited a competition website, and either “entered” it or ruled out the comp as something you want to enter by pressing “ignore”, then if you have the first tick box ticked The PrizeFinder will hide this particular comp and all others you have visited, from your listings the next time you visit the site. This is particularly useful this time of year, as it resets each day at midnight. So even though you marked a competition as “entered” yesterday, if it is a daily or an advent comp, it will show as un-entered again the next day, so you know to enter it again. Conversely though, if you mark a competition as “ignore” the system will ignore that competition for the duration of its life – even if it is an advent or a daily entry, you won’t see it again.
The last tick boxes allow you to customise your listings even further! You can choose to filter out and hide from your listings any comps where you need Facebook or Twitter, or where you need to enter via a blog or some other social media platform such as Pinterest or Instagram. This saves you heaps of time trawling through your listings and manually ignoring the competitions you aren’t interested in entering – The PrizeFinder does all the hard work for you! This is again particularly helpful at this time of year, as there are just so many competitions available, that you don’t want your feed full of Facebook or Twitter advents and dailies, if you don’t want to enter these kinds of competitions. The advent competitions are split out this year too, so you can concentrate on entering only the competitions you are interested in.
So there you have it, all the tools you could possibly need to customise your competition listings, to allow you to make the most of your comping time and get the best results!
Do let us know if there are other customisations you would like to see considered – we love hearing your ideas.
Happy Christmas Comping everyone, and lots of Lucky Dust to you all!
Kirsty x
