And now, a word from our sponsors

As you can see I've opted in for Google AdSense, I wasn't sure I wanted to let ads on my blog here but I read up about AdSense and decided that it's quite worthwhile for a number of reasons. Sure, I might make a buck or two from it in the long run but honestly the real reason I chose to use it is even more appropriate: It makes finding/linking to sweepstakes easier.

Most of the sweeps I post about are relatively well advertised promotions for big name companies. AdSense scans through what my articles are about and posts ads that are relevant to the topic, for instance I've posted about the Coca-Cola MyCokeRewards program before and sure enough google places an ad for that very same program. So yes Virginia, ads worth clicking do exist.

Speaking of the Coca-Cola MyCokeRewards; today in the mail there was an envelope from Best Buy waiting for me, sure enough it was my Best Buy Pitch-In card I had won from the MyCokeRewards instant win game. Way to go Best Buy with your quick turn around on sending those out... I've yet to check and see if the company running the promotion has loaded it yet though.

With Thanksgiving came the end to a number of the more worthwhile sweeps, no real wins to report I'm sad to say... then again there's always that (fairly large) chance I've won something without being notified so I'll just have to keep checking that old mailbox.

The month of December already looks promising for some potentially excellent (and some potentially great in an awful way) sweeps and promos so we shall see what the future may hole.

Watch where you're clicking

Now, it's not typical but from time to time entering sweepstakes can be the cause for a problem here or there. One example I remember was entering a series of "Win A Trip To _______" which you could only enter if you agreed to receive a promotional packet from the place you may be visiting. My mailman would have had a hernia if they had all arrived on the same day, in the end I had been given packets for probably a good 30-40 locations across the US, small would-be tourist towns mostly. I made the best use I could of them by scouring through to find some possible galleries to show my work in but in the end all I really got was a feeling of guilt and a ton of paper to recycle.

Recently a new mishap has come up.

I should preface this by saying there's all sorts of companies that do promotions, giving away things like ipods and computers, sometimes I can't help but enter even if I'm totally not the intended target audience. Women's magazines hold a huge portion of the market on good potential sweeps... so yeah.

Redbook, the women's magazine constantly has a number of sweepstakes up and running... I've never won one yet but I'm determined that one of these days I'll snag a good win from them. That is if I can avoid repeating my little mishap.

See, I use RoboForm, a fantastic little add-on to my browser, it fills out the basic forms you see on every contest (name, address, email etc etc) and while it makes entering new contests nice and speedy you really have to be careful that you look things over before submitting them. Well, one day I missed something, I glanced the page over, clicked submit and just at that very moment realized "Oh no, I forgot to uncheck the subscribe box". Super, a subscription to Redbook is not on my list of things I need to have.

Still, like most companies Redbook had a email notifier sent to me, I checked it and followed the directions to immediately unsubscribe. "Easy enough" I thought. Sad to say a couple days go by and I get an email invoice for my new subscription. Again I hop on their site, try and unsubscribe but the system doesn't find any info for me.

Another email invoice.

I proceed to contact the customer service center online, write to them to tell them I signed up accidentally, immediately cancelled it, never received an issue, don't want to etc etc...

Yesterday I walk out to check my mailbox for any new wins...

Shameless

Not all that glitters is golden and not all that gives wins is sweepstakes.

There's a number of "participate in our _____ and get a free ____" (fill in the blanks yourself, I'm sure you've seen them all) but for the most part I have to say they are almost always outright scams or awful deals I simply don't bother with the things.

There are, however, what I'll call "daily usage" participation programs that, to me at least, seem worth while. I'm gonna touch on a few of them (very few) and if you're interested you should do me the favor of joining via the referral option if there is one. As is always the case every little bit helps.

First off let's talk about my current favorite - Club Bing (link)
Club Bing is Microsoft's best invention yet. Ideally it's used to help them promote use of their search engine Bing (I personally hate the search and see it as no better than their previous system but to each his/her own). What it REALLY is though is games - plain and simple. They have word searches, letter scrambles, crosswords and they constantly have new games coming and going. Every time you play a game you earn "tickets" with a max of 1,000 tickets a day.

Tickets can be turned in for prizes - of which there is a great abundance and various levels. It reminds me of playing skiiball at the old arcades... save up your tickets or spend them right away, whatever you'd like. They update the prizes constantly (ranging from silly things like lip balm to kind of great prizes like air miles, the GPS system or portable hard drives now available. It's entirely free to play, I've never had any spam from them, you can play as little or as much as you'd like, they even have double ticket days where you are rewarded with twice what you'd normally get, raising the daily limit to 2,000 tickets. (there's a double ticket day coming up in just 4 days!) Free games, free prizes (yes even the shipping is free)

I've hauled in loads from this and it just keeps coming. Easily the best out there.

Next up SwagBucks:
(link)
Alright, I'll admit, the link for this one is a referral link. Yup, if you sign up with my referral link (which I'd totally appreciate) I'll get some bonus points which would help me out. If not, whatever, still worth looking into.
SwagBucks is interesting, I'm new to using it but have had it confirmed to be fully legit. Basically your goal here is to collect SwagBucks to turn in for any number of rewards. The easiest way to do so (in my opinion) is to set their search engine (which is powered by Google and Ask anyway just do like me and don't click the sponsored results.) as your default. I only search maybe 15-20 times a day and I've been averaging 3 bucks a day. Not bad. You can pull in more for doing some keep up work, some site interaction, facebook and twitter posts etc etc... yes you even pull in points for referrals (hint, hint)
SwagBucks are then collected and you can choose when you'd like to turn them in and what prize you'd like to get in return. They also have LOADS of different stuff from baseball cards to giftcards to full out gaming systems... just all sorts of stuff. Currently I'm just sticking with the 45 Swagbucks for $5 Amazon.com gift cards. I think it's among the best conversion rates available for anything I'd care to win from them. All I do is search with their search engine and I get Amazon.com spending money. Easy, quick, free. Win.

Lastly there's Lockerz
(link)
Lockerz is another collect to turn in style site... currently it looks to be in the beginning stages still and there's really very few ways to pull in points ("PTZ" as they call them. creative eh?) They have a referral system that gives increased rewards once you've had 20 people join under you, and they also have a daily question you can answer for 2 PTZ per day, you can also earn PTZ by shopping through them, but I don't recommend it.
They have a laundry list of rewards but currently there don't seem to be any that are actually AVAILABLE (to a less than 20 invite member at least) except some blah wallpapers. Still, with them being a newer site, it may pay to get on the boat now. Free to join... oh but you haveto be invited by an existing member. If you'd like to join just let me know.

Every Little Bit

So, when I first got into sweeps the one thing I wasn't expecting was the small wins. In reality small wins are the majority in most contests and sweeps, gift cards and product samples galore - when it boils down to it that's why these companies do the work to put out a promotion (or hire someone to do a promotion for them - more on that down the line) they want to promote their service or product.

In the past 2 days I've pulled in some fair little wins:

• $10 Best Buy Pitch-In card from Coca-Cola (MyCokeRewards.com) - It's a simple instant win game and if you check the rules there's a way to snag free entries every day. I played this one daily for weeks now but it only takes a few moments to enter and hey, $10? I'll take it.
• $5 Wendy's gift card from their NCAA Big Score promotion. (http://www.ncaa.com/wendys) - This is a great promotional game, you get entered in the full sweeps everytime you enter (up to 5 times daily) there's a simple way to get the codes for free right on the main page AND you get not one but two chances to win instantly every time you enter a code. That's 5 main sweeps and 10 instant games every day. On top of all that even if you don't win anything they still e-mail you codes good for $5 off a purchase at the Electronic Arts online store - just by playing my max entries for 2 days in a row I have $50 worth of discounts I could use (sadly they cannot be stacked... max of $5 off per purchase). If you need a code let me know.
• Free Febreze Air Effects 9.7 oz. from kmart's Mr. Bluelight's Christmas Countdown Collect & Win (link) - Alright, so maybe I'm not the biggest fan of kmart and sure they misspelled the company name on the print out coupon (Febreeze v. Febreze) but hey, on my second or third day playing their game I already had a win so who am I to complain? I'll use it. Their game has both instant win possibilities as well as a collect and win game.
• Free Pace Salsa from Pace's Hand-Pick & Win 2 instant win game (link) - So, unlike some past free products I've won Pace handles their win in a somewhat odd way... they don't send your the product they send you a coupon for $4 off their product - which generally costs less than 4 bucks. In a way it's nice, I can choose which salsa I'd like to try which, in reality, is much more likely to get me hooked then forcing a particular flavor on me. Now I need to win some free chips.

On top of all those wins I got my email notification that 2 of my orders from Club Bing have been shipped (more on Club Bing soon)

The Ghost of Wins Past (Part 1)

In the first visit of "wins from the past" is actually one of my "biggest" wins:

I've tried my best to make use of all my wins, either using it myself or handing it off to a friend or family member (seriously, everyone likes free) but every now and then there comes something that just doesn't fit. When that happens there's always our good ol' buddy eBay.

Earlier this year Marlboro ran their "Find Your Frontier" Sweepstakes - free to enter (as are all the sweeps I ever enter) they offered a great number of kind of frontier themed prizes; grills, sunglasses, golf clubs, tools, tents and my win... binoculars.

I didn't receive any notification that I had won (as far as I know... one hazard to "sweeping" you have to have a junk email account that you sort of watch sort of trash daily) but all of the sudden a fairly large box showed up on my door. "Marlboro? What the heck am I getting mail from Marlboro for?" The inside of the box was red as can be and there, neatly tucked away was the first "big" win I'd ever won a pair of Canon 10 x 30 Image Stabilizing Binoculars. They had some weight to them and being a photography man myself I knew weighty lenses were often good lenses.

Still, what use did I have for binoculars? At the time I lived in West Philadelphia not exactly a bird watching part of the country. I jumped on the computer, did a little search and found that these had an ARV (Average Retail Value) of near $500.

At the time I wasn't set up to sell on eBay just yet and the site was flooded with the buggers anyway (Marlboro gave away 50 of them surely I wasn't the only one selling mine) so I held on to it and sold them just this past week for $275 bucks plus shipping. The buyer got a fair deal on them and I get something much more useful to me - cold hard cash.

Thank you Mr. Marlboro Man.

Introduction

When I was a kid my sister and her boyfriends used to let me scratch off the tickets they picked up for the instant-win lotto anytime they picked some up from the local gas station, knowing that all that lay between us and our potential millions was a speckling of easily scratchable silver was always a thrill and made the gas station a fun time for a kid. That excitement alone (and I'm sure the ability to keep an other wise whining bored child amused at the gas station) made the dollar ticket well worth it.

Over the years I never did find that million dollar ticket, at least breaking even over a months time between wins and loses, at most winning enough to fund a small party between myself and some friends. I always have enjoyed the possibility, the chance to get something for (next to) nothing it's almost one of the classic American dreams.

Years and years ago I remember someone in the immediate family winning a couple cases of Coca-Cola, everyone was shocked because "no one ever wins those things" but right there in my own home was proof, people DO win.

As the years went on I'd occasionally jot down my info and drop it in a dropbox for a chance at a free car, a trip to Disney or even that old elusive 1 million dollars. I never really won anything as far as I can remember back then but for just a few seconds it allowed me that freedom to think "what if" and actually believe it could happen.

The "what if"s come alot more regularly now, there are more sweepstakes and contests out there than most people could even begin to imagine and yes people actually win them. In the past (let's round up and say) 2 years I've become a relatively active participator in as many sweeps and contests as I could stand to enter at a time. With a little direction from some of the more experienced "sweepers" I've picked up a few tricks, learned to tell what's worth the time and what's not - bringing in some sort of win on pretty regular occasion.

That was the pull, in case you missed it. The "some sort of win" is always curious. Sometimes it's handy ($5 Gift Card to Subway? Don't mind if I do!) sometimes it's not (ooooh a "Christian Sci Fi" book... yeah let me jump right on that page turner). But a win is a win, and everyday I look forward the fact that I May Already Be A Winner. Here I'll be keeping track of my wins (the good, the bad and the... well, "special") as well as throwing in the occasional tip for anyone that's interested in scratching off a card or two themselves.