Introduction

Do you dream of driving gleaming new cars, lazing on exotic beaches, furnishing your home with luxury goods, showering your family and friends with wonderful gifts? All presented to you free? Yes, it seems unbelievable but it’s true. I only wish I’d been less sceptical years ago.

There are thousands of pounds worth of competition prizes just waiting for some-one like you to win them. I’d read about people who never ever bought a car - they always won them. Yet I never dreamed I could win prizes. But I have. Now you can too. Here’s how...

Make those dream prizes yours
Dreams remain just that - dreams. Unless you ACT. I took action on finding a magazine prize draw. I answered three easy questions, wrote them on a postcard, added my name and address and sent it on its way. Three weeks later, I heard the mail being delivered. Now picture this scene.

Amongst the bills and circulars was a long white envelope. I opened it. Can you imagine your feeling of excitement reading these words:

‘Congratulations... you have won a family holiday to Miami,
staying at a luxury hotel with car hire and Everglades trip’

Believe me the thrill when you win is indescribable. A Miami holiday - and all for the price of a postcard and stamp!

Lady Luck
Every day some-one, somewhere, just like you, opens a congratulatory letter. It may be a T-shirt, bottle of wine, computer or a Caribbean cruise.

Now we both know that winning prize draws is based on the ‘luck of the draw’. But you can improve your chances of success by entering local prize draws or those where you have to search to find that ‘elusive entry form’. These attract less entries than widely advertised national ones.

But.. do enter any prize draw as someone always wins!

Words Win Prizes
You can increase your chances of success and win fabulous prizes by entering those competitions where you complete a task, for instance: ‘how many words can you make from the prize-winning car’s name’.

My second car, a Proton Persona, was scooped by finding the most words. This was great fun to do, as I systematically waded my way through a large volume dictionary to come up with 1,284 words.

It was more of a challenge trying to write these on a postcard - but was achieved by improvisation - a cut down cereal packet.

When I was presented with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and my car keys, many people said: ‘You’re lucky Lynne’. But Lady Luck doesn’t play a hand in these types of competitions. You just have to know about the competition and take the time to enter. If I can do it - so can you.

You can join the prize winners
Before you can enter a competition you will need some entry forms. You’ll find these in supermarkets, high street stores, banks, building societies, chemists, music stores, clothing stores, dentists, vets, garden centres, petrol service stations, in newspapers and magazines, at exhibitions, airports, train stations, ferry terminals - even on coasters at restaurants and bars. Plus comps on radio, TV and the Internet.

Competitions cover a wide range of easy or challenging tasks. Comping, as this hobby is affectionately know, is educational, exciting, stimulating and great fun. You can enter as few or as many competitions, devoting as much or as little time as you wish. Plus - a bonus when you win wonderful prizes.

I never dreamed I’d marvel at the spectacular Angel Falls in Venezuela - but I did thanks to a competition. It’s a hobby where your dreams can come true. The worlds your oyster. But you have to believe you can win and enter.

The knack
You can increase your chances of success and win fabulous prizes by entering those competitions where you are asked to write a tiebreaker slogan. Thousands of people when they hear the word ‘slogan’ immediately say ‘I never win, I can’t write one’. Like any other hobby there’s a knack to it. And it’s one that’s fun to learn.

The secret of success is all down to word play. Short and apt phrases to catch the judges eye.

Ten words won me my first car - a Ford Fiesta. All I had to do was identify eight items in the supermarket from the pictures on the entry form and write a tiebreaker slogan. ‘Supermarket is my Christmas choice because...’

"Christmas goodies, exciting show,
supermarket quality, I’m all aglow"

You can Win With Lynne
In 1994 I founded Intacomps Competition Club, which has attracted members from around the world. We are always delighted to hear when you win and are thrilled our tips are helping our members to win wonderful prizes including brand new cars, £3,000 Caribbean Cruise, Goa holiday, professional decorating, cameras, jewellery, microwaves and more.

Comping is a wonderful, challenging, educational and fun hobby. You never know what the postman will bring. And that’s what makes it so exciting.
Happy Comping, Lynne

Part One
Win a Wealth of Prizes What's in-store!
Before you begin to win you need some competitions to enter. Are you ready to go shopping?

First stop is your local food store or supermarket. As you search the aisles, you’ll soon notice that competition entry forms come in all shapes and sizes. Most of these are on colourful leaflets displayed beside the relevant products for example:

‘Win a healthy weekend break with BRAND X healthy eating products’

Some of these entry forms are for prize draws where all have to do to enter is complete your name and address before posting in the in-store box. It’s useful then to carry a pen with you, so you can enter at once.

Lady Luck
Other prize draws ask you to answer a few easy questions, rearrange some anagrams or find hidden words in a wordsquare, before posting in-store or mailing to the competition address in time for the closing date, which is when the competition ends.

In the United Kingdom, when you enter a prize draw, there has to be a method by which you can obtain free entry into a prize draw. The winner is chosen at random.

You can enter a variety of prize draws, giving you a chance to win prizes from teddy bears, footballs, boxes of chocolates, fridges and microwaves to holidays and new cars.

Although winning a prize is pure luck, some-one wins, so do enter.

It is important that you always read the competition rules to see if there are any entry restrictions for instance: ‘one entry per person aged 18 or over’ or ‘one entry per household’. Making multiple entries, when you are allowed to do so, will increase your chances of success.

As you go round the store, look out for entry forms in plastic wallets attached to shelves or on the chiller or freezer cabinets. Some stores have a special offer and entry form leaflet display rack situated just inside the entrance.

Skill v Luck
The majority of competition entry forms comprise two parts.

The first part of the competition is usually a task, and can take the form of factual questions, multiple choice questions, anagrams, how many words can you make from the product name or prize, wordsearches, crosswords, spot the differences, identifying places, buildings or people, photography, inventing recipes, or even putting features into order of merit.

The second part of the competition is the tiebreaker. Whilst captions, estimations, and other tasks are used, more often than not the tiebreaker will be a sentence completion. Compers refer to these as ‘slogan comps’.

For example: Answer the following two questions:

Q1. What is the capital of England?
Q2. What is the capital of Australia?

Now complete the tiebreaker using no more than 15 words:
‘I’d like to win a holiday to Australia with promoter’s cheese because...’

‘I never enter these because I can’t write a slogan’ many of you tell me.

You’ll be pleased to learn there’s a knack to writing winning tiebreaker slogans. It’s a skill you can learn and great fun too. But more about that later. Back to our shopping.

Qualifying for success
A quick study of the entry form will reveal you must enclose your till receipt showing your purchase of one or more items of the product. These proof of purchase till receipts are known as ‘qualifiers’ or their shorten version of ‘quallies’, for as the name implies they qualify you to enter the competition.

As these tiebreaker slogan competitions offer you the best chances of winning prizes, and we’d love to win a holiday in Australia, we’ll pop a couple of entry forms into our trolley along with our cheese.

You may remember I told you entry forms come in all shapes and sizes. As we go along the aisles you’ll notice entry forms on the sides of packets and cans. These may be prize draws or those slogan competitions.

Spotting an interesting looking competition on the reverse of a pack of pizza in the freezer cabinet, you may be attracted by the chance to win a holiday in Italy. As it’s a skill competition, i.e. you have to answer questions and complete a tiebreaker slogan, you check to see if you need a qualifying till receipt. Most of these tiebreaker competitions ask you to purchase a product, but some allow you free entry, so do read each individual set of on-pack or entry form rules.

For our pizza competition, the qualifier is a till receipt highlighting your purchase (a yellow highlighter pen is great for this) and a barcode. Let’s drop this in our trolley.

Whilst the majority of entry forms are on prominent display or can be found in the plastic wallets attached to shelves, some are more elusive.

`Sherlock Holmes’ would be proud of your detective skills as you locate tiny entry forms tucked between cabinets or half hidden under a pile of magazines.

The more ‘elusive’ a competition, the less entrants, the better your chances of winning.

In the `write place'
My friend won a fabulous holiday to Egypt by being observant combined with a bit of luck. She noticed some tiny forms tucked down by the side of the check out till in her local store. Reading the text, all she had to do was complete her details and pop into the in-store box. Finding the box was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Once, twice, three items she toured the aisles. She asked an assistant. Eventually, the box was located on top of a high shelf.

Donning basketball player skills, she retrieved the box and noted there were about nine entries in there. Obviously another nine ‘would-be winners’ like herself. She dropped her form in the box. The next day the store manager phoned. ‘Do you remember entering our competition to win a trip down the Nile?’ he asked. ‘Yes’. ‘Well I’m delighted to tell you you’ve won first prize’.

Now the interesting thing about this story is that there was a holiday to be won every day for ten days. By the tenth day, the prize box was located at the front entrance to the store, where you couldn’t possibly miss it - and there were literally thousands of entries in there.

My friend’s odds of winning were ten to one. On the tenth day her odds were several thousands to one. There’s a moral there somewhere. But let’s carry on with our shopping.

W-h-ine for a grape escape
You can find entry forms on collarettes around bottles of wines and spirits. These may be free-to-enter prize draws or tasks with slogan competitions. You may wonder how you can enter a free prize draw when you have to purchase the bottle in order to obtain the entry form collarette. Again, read the rules and you will discover you can enter by sending your details on a postcard or on a piece of plain paper. (UK - rules vary in different countries) This is where your pen comes in handy again, and of course a note book, unless you wanted to purchase the product of course.

Instant wins
As you begin to notice competitions, you can’t help spotting the `instant win’ promotions. These are on products emblazoned with the word WIN INSTANTLY a brand new car, or other prizes. When you open your pack or can you may find a ‘sorry you’re not a winner this time’ message or maybe you’ll be lucky and find a winning ticket, token or whatever you need to claim your prize instantly.

Thousands of instant win products are sold every day. Because a major prize can be won instantly, you have no way of knowing whether the winning pack has already been purchased and the prize claimed. Of the hundreds of compers I’ve spoken to on my Win With Lynne Roadshows and Fundays, the majority prefer prize draws to instant win promotions. This is because they know the winning postcard or entry form for a prize draw will be ‘picked at random’ from all entries received after the closing date, therefore giving all entrants an equal chance of winning at the same time.

As you read the rules on the instant win promotions (UK), you will see you can have a pack or can independently checked for you to see if it contains a winning ticket, without making a purchase. You just send your name and address on a piece of plain paper, i.e. white, unlined, to the on-pack address given.

Recipe for success
When you reach the check out, this is where your shopping and purchasing habits can change dramatically, as you enter more competitions.

Do you remember we needed a till receipt for our cheese and pizza? You will have to purchase these two products separately to obtain a till receipt for each one to enclose with your competition entry form.

And when you get home, you may have to eat your pizza the same day, as you need the barcode too. I’ve certainly become adapt at how many different ways I can serve up the same product when I’ve had to consume three or four of these in a short space of time.

I remember one market research lady at the end of the check out, studying my purchases with a quizzical eye. ‘Does your cat usually eat this kind of food?’ she prompted. ‘I haven’t got a cat’, I replied. Undeterred she continued, ‘What was the reason for buying this brand of biscuits? Was it because of the taste, the chocolate or quality?’ ‘Because there was a competition to win a car’ I told her. As she couldn’t find these answers on her list, she quickly disappeared to find a more ‘usual’ customer. Obviously not a comper!

Novel experience
Our next stop is the newsagents or book store. Here you’ll find a variety of competitions in national and local newspapers and magazines. Again, when entering prize draws, you’ll find your chances of success are greater in the local competitions, simply because they attract less entries than the nationals.

There are magazines to suit all interests and tastes and this is where your specialist skill or hobby can win you prizes. Do your friends admire the photographs you take? Then why not enter the photography magazine competitions. Can you cook up a mouth-watering meal out of a handful of ingredients? Then cookery magazine competitions or those featured on entry forms could result in some tasty prizes for you.

Whilst in here, let’s check out the book shelves. Organising a competition for a book launch is becoming popular. One well-known publisher regularly runs competitions on bookmark entry forms. Have a look on the customer services desk, you may find them there.

Although you may visit your food stores, supermarkets and newsagents on a regular basis, how often do you visit your garden centre, dentists or vets? All these outlets have entry forms.

Sowing seeds of success
Competitions have seasons too, so it's knowing when to visit certain outlets. For instance, when the seed manufacturers display stands make their appearance in the New Year, look out for seed packet size entry forms. Even though a well-known seed manufacturer has organised an annual competition for over five years, to win cars or holidays, it’s easy to miss the colourful entry forms, as they blend in with the surrounding seed packets.

`Bank-ing' on a `clean' getaway
March is the time when all those spring cleaning products are advertised and gives you a chance to make ‘a clean getaway’ to a prize-winning holiday or in your prize-winning car.

How many times do you go into a bank or building society other than the one you do business with? It’s worth popping into different ones on a regular basis, just to `cheque’ out any competitions they may be running. Reading the entry rules often reveals non-customers can take part.

So-fari so good!
Hunting for your entry forms is great fun. When I tell my family I’m going shopping, they don’t expect me to come back with new clothes or make-up from my expedition. No, I go on an entry form safari, returning with a variety of entry forms, qualifying purchases and my till receipts.

And as I prepare dinner, it’s not a question of ‘what do you fancy for dinner?’, but a ‘tonight we’re having pizza - to win an Italian holiday. Served with tomato salad - to win a holiday in the Canaries. Followed by apples - to win a healthy break in France. Followed by coffee - for a holiday in Brazil, and for a treat you can have a chocolate - to win a romantic Valentine’s cruise, of course!’

Believe me after the sceptical ‘You won’t win, why don’t you give up’, comments, it’s now, ‘Isn’t it time you won another holiday? I’m packed ready to go’.

When we visited a friends house and he proudly showed us his newly purchased car, my children quizzed, ‘That’s great - what did you win that on then?’

When you’re at a loose end and not sure where to go for a day out - take a tip and go to an exhibition. They are a compers treasure trove. Visiting a computer show, I entered over twenty separate competitions, most of which were free prize draws offering a wide range of prizes.

You may find, like me, that when you go out on an entry form safari, you may only come home with two different competitions. Other times you go out for a meal and a drink, competitions the last thing on your mind, and you discover a prize draw on your coaster and can enter the tiebreaker slogan competition to win a car, when you order a side salad with your meal. Yes, you guessed it. Salad it was. And after all those chocolate competitions, it’s probably a good choice.

Lynne's Hot Tips

1. Enter all prize draws - pure luck but some-one wins
2. Enter local prize draws - they attract less entries than national draws
3. Visit stores on a regular basis to collect your competition entry forms
4. Be a `Sherlock Holmes’. Search for those elusive entry forms - they attract less entries
5. Use Intacomps Shopping List (UK) to help find your comps, with advice & Lynne’s Slogan Tips, such as: `With tempting tastes and brand new wheels, celebrating in luxury really appeals', which won a car!
6. Purchase your qualifying products and keep your till receipt safe
7. Post your competitions at least a week before the closing date
8. Be positive - believe you can win - and you will
9. Learn the skills for success
10. Read, study, visualise and practice (RSVP)

End of Part One. Please click here to read Part 2 of this article.

© Copyright Lynne Suzanne 2000

About the author
Lynne Suzanne is a competitions consultant, columnist, author and Roadshow presenter. She has won a wealth of prizes including TWO cars and worldwide holidays and has written four books on this fascinating subject.
Subscribe FREE to Win Competitions, electronic ezine http://www.wincompetitions.co.uk   
Read her articles at: http://www.win-with-lynne.co.uk

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