2012: You win some…
It’s blogging tradition now for me to look back on my competition successes at the end of each year, and also my favourite failures (check those out on my other blog post here!). I use Google Drive to keep a spreadsheet record of my wins – which also makes it easier to chase prizes that haven’t materialised – and as a geek I do enjoy checking my stats every year. In 2012 I won 160 wonderful prizes worth around £22,000 in total – about the same as in 2011. Many of these were toys won in blog competitions, postcard draws and on Facebook.
This year I made an appearance on BBC News and in the Daily Express, although I knew I’d really made it when the Huffington Post ran a story about me!
As usual, the majority of my prizes this year were won in creative competitions and here’s a run down of some of my favourite successes…
In January Ry’s messy kitchen exploits won £100 Amazon vouchers in the Baby Budgeting messy kids competition, and £200 of Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners in their Facebook comp!
One of our favourite projects was this Kleenex video to show how to cheer up the family when they’ve got a cold – we won £100 John Lewis vouchers with this masterpiece!
I blogged about my fabulous win with HTC here – part of the challenge was to recreate an LP sleeve which gave me the opportunity to dress up as Kylie! This won me £1000 of music memorabilia and a new phone.
In February a tiebreaker comp listed in Compers News won me £1000 to spend on a Spanish holiday, whilst in March I discovered a new iPhone App called Blippar and bagged £500 ASOS vouchers in their monthly comp (I shared this in Compers News and readers went on to pick up most of the remaining prizes!). In Summer a Wimbledon-themed outfit created on ASOS won me another £250 vouchers in a Nivea competition too!
In March I won one of my best prizes ever – a night’s stay in Copenhagen with dinner at the world’s best restaurant (read all about it here). This was in a Foodie.fm recipe competition – the last voting competition I entered in fact. Considering some of the wonderful recipes on the site, my simple beetroot risotto was an undeserving winner – but then, that’s why voting competitions are so wrong isn’t it?!!
Later that month Rob and I both won an iPad2 in the space of a few weeks – I won one at a NEC show where there were a handful of entries, and Rob won a Metro.co.uk Twitter photo comp which had just ten entries. Wins like this prove that it IS possible to find low entry comps out there – and fairly easy to win them too!
In Summer I was lucky with text comps – a £1000 Eurocamp holiday and a VIP Olympic trip, both of which I saw on the Compers News Chatterbox forum. I also won a family Olympics trip with VISA in their Instant Win competition.
Another type of low entry competition I tried this year was the ‘video review’ – which I find tricky as they generally have to be done with a (fairly) straight face! I gave these a try and won £200 High Street vouchers with a review of Maybelline mascara, and a night’s stay at the Savoy plus £300 cash with a review of a Philips iron I received for my Come Round party!
This year Pinterest comps took off too – I won a Start Rite comp to meet Myleene Klass & received 5 pairs of shoes for Ry, a new phone & goody bag in the Phones4U festival photo comp, £250 i-escape vouchers and a tin of Biscuiteers with Red magazine (the last two were unfair ‘most followers’ competitions which I blogged about here).
There was also a flurry of fun Instagram comps – this photo of Ry eating Yoomoo won us an iPod Shuffle and lots of YooMoo vouchers!
There were lots of great Olympic-themed photo comps on Facebook and Ry picked up a £50 Tesco voucher with his melon weight-lifting.
My Union Jack Jubilee tarts won me a ‘Great British Street Party‘ which was so much fun – a double decker bus with food and games (and prizes!) for my street.
Metro launched a competition for ten people to win a place on a cookery class with Raymond Blanc – to enter you had to tweet a photo of you doing the can-can! I won, and took my friend Jan – we had a great time, and met fellow compers Kevin & Chris there too – read about it here!
HeyUGuys ran a competition to celebrate ET on Blu-Ray, and we won a new HDTV with our recreation of our favourite scene in the movie!
As usual we had loads of fun on Halloween with fancy dress and fun food, and our Mummy & Monster photos won us Sunday lunch at our local DeVere hotel as well as a lovely Trunki toybox.
And although I was short on time at Christmas when my life was overtaken with organising the PrizeFinder Advent comps, I did find time to win a few fun comps – a £200 Laura Ashley voucher and a return ticket on National Express with my festive jumper (I knew that was £8 well spent at Urban Outiftters!)
….and a lovely hamper of goodies on the Parcel2Go Facebook page with an expertly wrapped toilet seat!
But that’s enough about MY comping – I know from your Facebook posts, emails, comments and tweets that lots of you have had an AMAZING 2012 with tons of wins in creative comps too. I’d love to do a blog post featuring YOUR favourite winning photos and videos, with a few words about your best wins in 2012. To say thankyou, one lucky contributor (picked at random) will win a mystery fancy dress prize! If you’d like to contribute, send through your photo(s) and wins to di@superlucky.co.uk before Monday 7th January 2013 – I’ll only use your first names on the blog. Thankyou!
Wishing you all a really lucky 2013!
