Thursday 20 June 2013

Competitions & Couponing

One thing I do in my free time is enter competitions and print out coupons to use when shopping.  A lot of people have scoffed and laughed at me when i've told them of my little hobby but i'm not fussed, i'll carry on winning my cool freebies and knocking money off my supermarket bills!  I have been doing this since the end of July 2012 and doubt i'll be stopping anytime soon.

Couponing wise it's not something i've delved into as much as competitioning, it gets me a couple ££ or a freebie here and there off my shopping and i'm completely happy with that.  It's not as easy as it is in say the US to come away with your entire shopping free but it is do-able but requires effort on your part.  Offer Oasis & Magic Freebies are two of the best sites that link to a variety of coupons and free offers.  Please be careful and read the terms & conditions on some of the offers though as there have been some complaints.  If it looks remotely dodgy, just don't do it!   I don't do any offers (unless it's a genuine reputable company) where I have to give my card details and feel this is definitely sound advice to follow.  Be warned as well, a lot of these tend to be links to Facebook product pages, so if you don't have one and want to get into couponing i'd get onto that!  Aside from these sites there's also Hot UK Deals, check out their freebie section although there are some fantastic bargains and money off vouchers for many other sites posted there and you may find you get distracted! Finally if you've liked/disliked a product, email them and tell them why and what they could change etc and some companies will post out coupons to you!

There are so many great places to look for competitions, Facebook is a fantastic place to start - just going to the pages of products you like and you'll most likely find 50% of them have some kind of competition tab at the top.  A lot of like & share competitions pop up but I don't enter a lot of these, they tend to irritate your friends and have little chance of winning - at least in my opinion.  Alongside this Twitter is also a great place to look for competitions but it can become tricky when you reach maximum followers and also tweet limits.  If you want an easier way to enter competitions via Twitter then I thoroughly recommend Twitninja, users add the competitions to the site so all you have to do is click 2-3 buttons max and you're all done on each specific one.  It has retweeting limits to begin with when you are a new user but these soon increase just don't anger Twitter too much!  There are Pinterest competitions but i'll be completely honest with you I don't really fully understand it and so I tend to stay away (at least for the time being) from what i've heard they don't tend to get many entries so you have a higher chance of winning.  Downsides are that they tend to take a little time and some effort and that's if you can get your head around the site!

There are other websites that list competitions but if social networking is your thing it's the perfect way to sneak a bit in with your general surfing of the net and maybe win a few prizes.  MSE & Loquax both have competitions listed on their forums, added by other users - I have used both of these at several times over the past year but I always drift back to The Prize Finder.  I don't tend to like entering competitions from a forum style site for some reason, purely personal but they do come in handy as users post up almost every type of competition you can think of from phone in to magazine competitions.  As I mentioned I tend to always drift back to The Prize Finder, it's easy to create an account, easy to view and mark competitions as entered or save for later.  New competitions are added daily and there's even a monthy competition run by the lovely people who run the site!  Whether you're looking for a specific prize or a competition ending on a specific day The Prize Finder is easily navigatable and a surefire way to get on your way to winning!

Hope this helps anyone who maybe fancies dabbling in some comping & couponing - it's not for everyone this I understand but fun and worth it if you can get into it.  If you have any questions please feel free to ask :)

Specific Comping/Couponing links


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