Becoming a proper comper

I love entering competitions and sometimes I get lucky, but I've never really reached the heady heights of some, who seem to be able to make it a full-time 'career'.

I first got the competition bug when I was six years old. I was messing around and answered a competition question posed on the Saturday morning TV show, 'Get Set', and my mum sent in my answer, which was picked out of the hat. The competition was to guess the name of a Sealink ferry and the prize was a VIP trip to its inauguration. My dad and I had a brilliant day and I even got my photo in the local paper.

Since then, I've dabbled in various competitions, raffles and giveaways with varying degrees of success. Let's just say I've done alright for myself bearing in mind I've not made a concerted effort. In the past couple of years I've won a Kindle, a hamper of Montezuma chocolates, a big bag of cosmetics, an Adore Naturals box of goodies (see my blog post about the eye make-up remover I won) and a Frozen colouring book.

But I've decided to try and take things up a notch. So, for the next six months I've set myself a challenge to try and enter more competitions - I'm aiming to enter around 50 per week - because I'm curious to see where the journey will take me.

I've got a few rules in place:

1. I will not pay to enter competitions (except for the cost of stamps and postcards). So this means no texting to enter and no calling premium phone lines.
2. I will record every competition I enter in a little notebook so I can see what I've entered and try and ascertain my success rate.
3. I will try not to spam my friends and family with details of every competition I enter, so I will restrict the retweets to my SeasideBelle Twitter account rather than my personal Twitter account and I'll try and limit the number of Facebook shares.
4. I will only enter competitions where the prize is something I will find useful or is something that will benefit someone else (a friend, family member or local charity). I don't see the point of entering a competition for the sake of it, the prize should be useful to me or someone I know.

So far, I've joined a competition forum on moneysavingexpert to get tips on potential competitions to enter. At the moment, I'm more of a lurker on there, but once I get used to how it all works, I'm hoping to share what I've learnt to help others. And, of course, I'll keep you updated on my progress via this blog.

Do you enter competitions? Are you a comper? What are your most notable successes?