Tips & Advice on Getting Help With Competition Entries
As much as it is about the single-minded pursuit of prizes, comping is also an interactive social hobby and provides many options for compers looking for a helping hand in their quest for success.
Specialist Competition Magazines
There are now a huge number of competition magazines, which are all looking for a share of the profitable marketplace of consumer competition assistance. Such publications try to offer everything a comper might need to find their winning feet. Typically this includes hints and tips, articles from well known compers, tiebreaker archives, entry tracking facilities and, most importantly, access to a wealth of new competitions.The publication standard is often fairly poor, sometimes even amounting to nothing more than a flimsy newsletter, but it is not the beautiful design that is prized by the respective readerships but the information contained within.
Of course this potentially valuable information comes at a price and usually this is a subscription fee. It is unusual to find competition magazines available as single issues, but instead as yearly commitments. This can amount to between £40 and £60 in cost, a not inconsiderable investment. Ultimately compers see such publications as a bargain if the prizes start rolling in and a bitter waste of money if they don’t.
Who Are Competition Websites Really Helping?
Competition websites such as Loquax and The Prize Finder appear to offer similar attractions as their paper cousins, but in a more modern user friendly format. However, such online assistance is often regarded with greater suspicion amongst the comping community.Many online comping sites are cynical operations set up to either get as many people to enter certain third party competitions or to obtain personal contact data, or even both. The competitions on offer will typically offer very small chances of winning and the site owner promoting them will be rewarded with a payment every time somebody enters. The data collection sites are only interested in getting a comper’s contact details, such as My Offers and win4now, to pass this information onto other companies, and ultimately this will lead to the poor comper being inundated with junk mail.
Slogan and Tiebreaker Assistance
Writing tiebreaker slogans is commonly regarded as the trickiest area of comping and so it is no surprise that there are a lot of opportunities for those who have yet to master the art to find some assistance.Comping sites and magazines, for example, invariably provide some kind of expert tuition as well as archives of previous winning lines to give novices an idea of what attracts a judge’s eye. The more experienced slogan writer on the other hand will have developed their own personal reference assistance in their local library and bookshop. A tiebreaker champion will probably have at least one good rhyming dictionary by their bedside, as well as several faithful and well-thumbed reference books.
Booker Prizes
Apart from the ever dependable dictionary, a thesaurus, encyclopedia, rhyming dictionary are also standard comping tiebreaker tools. Beyond these there are a wealth of reference books that will aid any focus on a specific topic area, such as an atlas for geographical puzzles and a film guide for entertainment themes.There are of course also a great many books available specifically aimed at the comper. Such specialist handbooks include comping guru Brita Bevis’ ‘I’m a Winner Because: a Guide to Winning Consumer Competitions’, ‘Prize-Winning Ways’ by respected comping authority Robert Kendal and, for still who still need help with tiebreakers, there’s ‘How to Win Any Slogan Competition’ by Angelina Kaye. There are a great many more that will be uncovered on the internet with a simple google or amazon search.
