Hello everyone! How was your weekend, any nice wins to report? I had a couple of surprise wins arrive this week of a Wild Pets Spider and habitat toy from a Character competition, and a kids calming colouring book from Primary Times. This last prize was particularly useful as a gift for my eldest daughter who had her tonsils removed on Friday. She found the book very comforting and a great place to put her worries down on paper – I love it when competition prizes make a nice treat for someone I love. Not going to be comping as much I am sure this week, as my daughter will be home from school recovering from her operation. However, the Christmas prizes are stacking up nicely so my comping efforts are still being rewarded – always nice to be able to comp for other people!
I don’t know about you but my social media feeds seem to have gone mad with competitions the last few weeks. There are lots of Christmas-themed competitions already as well as lots of Halloween comps and a whole host of other general competitions. I find it very easy to get side-tracked so I am trying to avoid social media when I can, and concentrate on using The PrizeFinder as my main source for competitions. I have a Christmas Gift Wish-list at the moment so I make sure to search for the prizes I am trying to win first and foremost, and then work my way through the prize on The PrizeFinder.
The comping season is only going to increase and get even busier from here on in, on the march towards Christmas and the wonder of The Advents – I think now is a great time to start to think about organising your comping time and methods. As a registered member of The PrizeFinder you have access to a wide range of useful tools to help you get on top of your comping, and streamline your time too. Let’s have a look at what is available to you
To fully utilise and customise your comping experience with The PrizeFinder you need to be a registered member (it’s free!) and logged into your account. To access the “Customise Listings” section of the website log into your account and 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 spicy how The PrizeFinder shows you competitions, as well as the kind of competitions you want to see and how often.
Number of results to display in prize listing
First things first let’s tell The PrizeFinder how many results you want to see on each page of your prize listings – ranging from 10-50. Some compers find they prefer a long list of prizes to enter all in one go, giving them fewer pages to work through overall. Other compers like to have lots of short pages to work through in smaller, bite-sized chunks. The choice is as always yours!
Number of days to check ahead for closing competitions
Next you can customise how many days you tell The PrizeFinder to look ahead for Competitions closing. This is a great way to organise your time as, for me, this allows me to manage which days have the most competitions ending and will require more comping time. For example the last day of the month is always a super-busy one, and if I can see in advance how many competitions are closing on that date I can make a start on it sooner or leave it nearer the time if it is a quiet month for EOM comps. 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; preferences.
Number of days ago to mark competitions as new from
Next we see a useful down menu specifying how long ago to mark a competition as “New” from. If, like me, 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. This can be useful for busy periods such as summer holidays and Christmas too, as maybe you have a period away from the site and haven’t been accessing it as often as you would. Change the mark as new date to a longer time frame, to check back on what has happened since you were last online with The PrizeFinder.
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. I find it most useful to order my competitions by closing date (it also covers closing time), as when I am browsing competition sections such as Home & Garden or Holidays I like to make sure I am not missing comps that are ending soonest and get those done first. If I was trying to enter all the competitions from a certain company however, I like to change this to website name and work through them alphabetically making sure I get all the ones I want to from a certain company.
Tick Boxes
Underneath the useful 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 from your listings the next time you visit the site. This is particularly useful coming up to Christmas 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 sets of 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, Twitter or recurring daily blog comps.
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 comping everyone, and lots of Lucky dust to you all!
Kirsty x
