What should you do when you want to track down comps that are linked to one particular occasion?
Competitions that are themed around an upcoming event are very common. At Christmas time, for example, you can barely move for all the Advent and festive comps there are to be enjoyed.
And at this time of year, we're seeing a lot of Mother's Day themed comps spring up, as well as the inevitable Easter comps.
That's without even mentioning that the latter part of January and first half of February were packed to the rafters with comps with a Valentine's twist.
So what ways does a comper have of trying to keep track of what's out there when it comes to these seasonal comps?
One way to find some, of course, is to check places like the Compers News Blog, where we sometimes bring you themed posts that pick out a few comps of this sort.
But as with any kind of comp, you'll be able to do your own detective work to try and search-out prize chances like this.
Whereas you might know some of the places to look to discover, say, film related prizes (film magazines, their websites etc), you might not instantly realise the sorts of places that will have comps linked to a certain event.
That said, you could take a good stab: For Easter, chocolate companies are perhaps likely to try a prize promotion, for example. For Mother's Day you might try parenting blogs.
Searching is perhaps the most convenient way to track down this type of comp.
On ThePrizeFinder - the Accolade website focused on online comps - you can search Mother's Day at the moment and get results for a range of cool comps that feature the phrase in their listings.
To pick just one of the comps listed on the site, treasure box is running a comp with the prize of a Ritz afternoon tea experience. With a closing date of March 30th, entry is via an online form.
Google is another good place to search for comps. We recommend using phrases like 'Mother's Day Competition' and seeing what comes up.
The top results are likely to be recent when you search for occasion comps in this way, but you can also refine the search using Search tools to narrow things down to very recent results, for example.
Another tip is to check the News results, because they will often list some recently published articles from places like newspaper websites that are describing a recent comp.
National newspapers are one of the highest profile places you can find comps.
Oh, and you might want to refine your main and news search results down to the UK, so that you can be more sure the results you see will be for comps you're able to enter where you live!
Remember that Google isn't the only search engine - using others, even for the same phrase, can be a good idea. All the search engines will order the results you see differently, though of course there will be some overlap.
Themed comps can be really fun - and might give you a nice sense of the occasion if you spend a happy afternoon entering a few.
They can offer plenty of surprises, because although you often see, say, Mother's Day comps linked to flowers and other symbols associated with the occasion, other comps that promoters are linking with an event might not actually offer prizes that are that strongly associated with it at all.
If you're more interested in, say, finding comps where you can win a particular thing - chocolate, for example - using this in your searches is more likely to bring you the types of comp you're after.
