With a new year nearly upon us, there could hardly be a better time to make The Prize Finder and Compers News part of your life and get serious about the fun of comping.
If you're the sort of person who enjoys finding that your crisp packet has a competition on it, but you've not yet taken the step to become a full-blown serious comper, then why not make 2014 the year you make that transition?
A great first step in bringing up your chances of entering, and then potentially winning, more comps next year is to get involved with both Compers News and the comping magazine's publisher, Accolade's The Prize Finder website.
Used in conjunction with each other, these provide a fantastic way to make your prize-hunt much more methodical and much less about chancing across comps now and then.
They could be a brilliant way of improving your chances of making sure that far more prizes come your way during the next twelve months.
Motivating yourself to really get comping more could also be a case of honing-in on exactly what you want to win. There are so many comps out there, and it could be that you're not interested in many of the prizes on offer.
If this is the case, you could decide that this is the year that you only go for comps that have certain categories of prize you're really interested in, such as cars. Choosing a few such categories, rather than just one, will mean more suitable comps are likely to come up for you, of course.
With your top categories in mind, when you look at the listings in Compers News, which layout prizes that are available to be won in a really quick-to-scan way, you can prioritise the comps that fit your comping desires, and get your name in for them first.
The Prize Finder is great in this way, too. It's not called The Prize Finder for nothing, it really can help you discover the right prize opportunity - with the help, for example, of its listings by prize category. You may well want to bookmark the Cars and Motorcycles page and head back daily if you are after the chance to win a car, for example!
The Prize Finder could also help you to expand your comping horizons, because it makes it so easy to see that there are a huge number of social media comps out there, for example.
What both Compers News the magazine and The Prize Finder do is mean that you can enter lots of comps after looking in just one place, the mag or the website. You should look for comp opportunities elsewhere, too, of course - Accolade's Compers Update is a great example - But these two places are great, easy-as-pie starting points.
If you're going to be a more serious comper in the New Year, it's a good idea to use all the options that are available to you for tracking-down the sorts of comps you want to enter.
Google, it goes without saying, is a great resource for this sort of thing, as are other internet search engines. Use the right search terms and you could bring-up results for super-relevant comps that you just wouldn't have come across by chance.
Joining-up to social media services (things like Pinterest and Instagram as well as Twitter and Facebook) and then following or liking reputable organisations linked to the sorts of comps you want to find can also help bring great prize chances your way.
We've talked about the idea of getting serious about comping in this piece, but in a way there's no such thing - comping is always something people do for pleasure. There's the fun of methodically ticking off comps-entered (with its sense of achievement) for example, and of thinking about possible prizes. We've used the phrase to suggest having a more direct approach to your comping - something which could pay off in 2014 and beyond!
