From The Contest Queen

I have been entering and winning consistently for the past seven years, yet for the past two we have only won one big grand prize and it came in my husband’s name. I wanted to know why I wasn’t winning “the big ones”. Then I discovered something interesting about the Law of Attraction and duality.

You have to be here to win, especially big. Let me explain. We live in a world of duality: on/off, up/down, happy/sad, win/lose, etc. I have a tendency to live in the future. What do I mean by that? Well, I am a planner. I like to plan my day, my week, my life because it gives me the illusion of control. (If you like to control your life and circumstances, I have bad news for you, you are not really in control. None of us are.) While I am busy planning, I am in the future at the meetings, events and trips. (This is different than visualization where you feel as if you are driving the new car now.) I found out if you are anywhere other than here, you are no where.

If you are no where, instead of now here (the duality), the Law of Attraction will not work. The three steps are: Ask, Believe and Receive. If you are no where, then it’s like placing and order, moving and not telling anyone. The order arrives, finds no one home and returns it undeliverable. The items gets put back in the warehouse and is delivered to the next person that places the order.

So, for the next little while I am not focusing on prizes or wins. I am focusing on being here. I am here, now. I am present, now. (It will be interesting to see if any of the orders I placed with the Universe in the past show up since I am now “at home”.)

I highly recommend listening the the four part webcast about Jill Bolte Taylor’s life changing experience and how she learned to live in the now.

I am now here and you can be too.

While cooking dinner the other evening I received a winning phone call. WOO HOO! I get so excited when I win. While getting all the details of my win, the gentleman commented on how nice it was to speak someone who was so excited about the prize (a one day family pass to our local zoo). He was giving out 75 passes and I was the first one he had spoken with that was happy.

WHAT?! How could anyone not be happy about winning? Why enter if it is not to bring unexpected fun and excitement plus unplanned adventures into your life?

So next time you get that winning call, get excited! Make the person notifying you happy he called you today.

The Complete Guide To Prize Contests, Sweepstakes and How To Win Them by Selma Glasser was published in 1980.  What an interesting book.  It’s focus is on contests.  She teaches you how to win by writing all types of verse including; couplets, quatrains, limericks along with naming, caption and slogan contests.

Selma offers up some cute examples:

This book is what contestors need
To help their entries take the lead.

You needn’t be so very wise
To snare a handsome contest prize.
You only need to take a look
At winning lessons in this book.

What I really liked is she gave us a bit more history on the hobby.

We can look back on years of prize give-aways in the United States since 1900.  Of course, there had been some contests-more literary than commercial-in this country before the present century began, but they were too rare to be recorded here.  Even in 1900, contesting was a comparatively unknown hobby, with few followers and with awards amounting to only $15,000.

By 1910, newspaper files show that $500,000 in prizes were offered, and there were about 100,000 contest fans.  Within ten years the number of prize-seekers had grown to a million, mostly attracted by newspaper and magazine contests.

By 1930, national commercial advertisers had become convinced that prize contests offered a fertile field for promoting the sales of their products.  During that decade, their ever-increasing offers of cash and merchandise brought the number of entrants to nearly 12 million, and the total value of prizes for the ten-year span soared past the $100-million mark.

Selma also wrote one chapter on recipe contests and one chapter on sweepstakes.  The book is very detailed and I felt like a D student in English class.  While reading I was quietly happy the hobby moved to sweepstakes, because I don’t think I would win a single prize entering contests of yesteryear.

The two very interesting things I read about this week related to contesting and sweepstaking are: some experts predict that companies with triple their spending on online promotions over the next five years. Last year U.S. companies spent 1.89 billion dollars on sweepstakes so in 2012 companies will spend 5.67 billion dollars. There are now, and will be, a lot of prizes to be won! (Read more here.) And, sweepstakes websites are the fifth fastest growing Internet property. (Read more here.) Just more places to find and enter sweepstakes! WOO HOO!

Back to our U.S. adventures. After a wonderful Saturday in Warren MI hanging out with heaps of our sweeping buddies, early Sunday morning we headed down to Payne OH to visit with The Affadaisies. (If you don’t know who The Affadaisies are, read the book or watch the movie; The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio.)

We arrived just in time for lunch. Being the grandmotherly figure she is, Dortha would not allow us to take her and her husband out to eat, instead she served us lunch. After lunch, one son, his wife and two other club members: Alice and Betty arrived. Just like the “good old days”, the men retired to the living room while the women stayed in the kitchen. We drank lemonade, ate cookies and chatted about contesting vs. sweepstaking.

I did find out what happened to the now defunct National Contestors Association. Once contests disappeared in favour of sweepstakes, the association folded. Dortha had attended a few of their conventions and told me the word sweepstakes in that circle was a dirty word. I don’t know what year they folded exactly but it was sometime after 1982.

We headed back through Defiance OH. As we drove around town, I imagined what like must have been like for Evelyn Ryan. We took a picture of the home she lived in on Washington Avenue for most of her life.

I find it amazing that two women I never met, Evelyn and Terry Ryan, could have changed my life so much. It was through reading Terry’s book about her mom Evelyn, that lead me to met Dortha and all her friends.

Yesterday, for the first time in eight years, I hired a cleaning service; The Maids. When we first got married, our solution to stop arguing over housework was to hire a home cleaning service. They were great, everything sparkled and the arguing stopped. When we bought our first home, we hired the local branch of the same cleaning service. They were terrible. There was no consistency between franchise owners. (Consistency is key to a good franchise. Just ask McDonald’s.) So, we tried about half a dozen other cleaning services. None would clean thoroughly. I even offered to pay more for a better job, but to no avail.

Last year The Maids had an online sweepstakes and part of the promotion was, you had to watch a demo of how thoroughly they cleaned. After entering everyday for two weeks, I thought, “Maybe I have finally found a service that will clean my home the same way I do.” I checked their website and, sadly, there was no franchise owner in my area. Last weekend I went to a local home show (to enter all the sweepstakes of course) and The Maids had a booth. YEAH! Someone decided to buy a franchise in my area. I took them up on their home show special offer. A team of four people showed up and now my home sparkles.

Sweepstakes are a very effective marketing tool. It made a first time customer out of me. To convert first time customers to long-term customers a company must deliver what promises. Since they have lived up to their claims, they now have a permanent customer out of me.

What product or service have you switched to because of a sweepstakes?

If you have not entered already, The Maids is running their promotion again and it’s open to Canada and the U.S. Ends May 31st.

Sandra Grauschopf writes the Contests & Sweepstakes section on about.com and was lucky enough to get an advance copy of the documentary. She is one lucky lady. I was in it, and I have to wait until it airs on TV next Thursday! Sandra wrote a review of the film I thought you may enjoy.

Found this rant on YouTube. This fellow doesn’t understand quite a few things about how PIN code contests and sweepstakes work, and why companies run them. Firstly, companies run sweepstakes to sell more products, plain and simple. PIN codes are a way for the company to interact on another level with the consumer. Many of the PIN code promotions have games and activities attached to them designed to make the promotion fun and exciting.

Yes, not everyone has a computer at home, but many can use their computer at work to enter on their lunch hour or visit their local public library.

He also wants to know who regulates games of chance in the United States. Sweepstakes are overseen by the Federal Trade Commission, the United States Postal Service, the Federal Communications Commission and the United States Department of Justice. Ensuring sweepstakes are fair and run correctly is taken very seriously by the U.S. Government.

He rants that even McDonald’s tried to cheat its customers. It did not. One of its employees, a Vice President, tried to cheat both the consumers and the company giving away the winning pieces to friends and family. He was caught. That type of fraud usually comes with a very stiff jail sentence. Since then McDonald’s has implimented further measures to ensure their sweepstakes are run properly.

If you visit YouTube, you can read the comments others have left and I really like the one posted by fitchalfitchal.

Tom Wethern (aka Weth) and I are kindred souls. He and I are obsessed with entering contests and sweepstakes, enter mainly online, share our prizes and believe the hobby is a free form of gambling (which we both would be addicted to if it were not for the wonderful marketing efforts of corporations).

Check out Weth’s website as he not only shares his wins with friends and family, but the world-at-large. Some prizes he just gives away, but the rest require some effort on your part. You must write a limerick or a haiku in order to win.

Carol Shaffer wrote a book in 2002 called Contest Queen. Her book focuses on mail-in and in-person sweepstakes. She was recently interviewed for KETC in St. Louis.