Part 1 of an article by Lynne Suzanne

When I first discovered comping on the web, I thought hey, this is great. Perhaps you thought so too.

Think of the advantages – no postage costs, no envelopes, no costly phone calls. Just settle down in front of the screen with a nice cuppa tea. Log on to the Internet, search for a few competitions and enter.  Bliss!

Or so I thought. Perhaps this is your experience too.

 I decided to compare postal comping with comping on the web and allocated myself an hour of Internet comping.  But where do you start? That’s a good question. 

Well, supermarkets have competition entry forms so why not start there, seemed to be an obvious answer.

Bombarded with TV adverts to visit this website or that one, I concluded that if I keyed in each supermarket name followed by either .co.uk or .com  I’d get somewhere.

So I started with store names adding a .co.uk or .com  Now when you enter a website, it’s a bit like going into a store.  You go through the door, decide which aisles to wander down, have a look around, take any purchases to the check out, pay and exit. Similarly, you enter a website and instead of viewing aisles, you look at the navigation bar, which is usually on the left hand side of your screen, make your selection and with a double click of your mouse, in you go to another page.

At one web store I discovered a hyperlink which invited me to "register for news and win". A hyperlink, just in case you are new to web comping, is either a word which appears in blue lettering and is underlined or a picture, which when you move your mouse’s cursor over it,  displays a hand symbol.  This then tells you that if you double click  with your mouse or on your laptop touchpad, you will hyperlink straight into another page or in some instances another website.

I double clicked the  hyperlink, and hey presto, I was on another page which explained about the prize draw.

At some websites you go straight to the prize competition page where you can enter.  Others take you to a page which explains about the prize competition, only after you’ve read through a  mountain of text about a new product or  service and clicked through half a dozen or so more pages to get to it.

Now I know you’re not so naïve as to think that promoters give away a car, holiday or other prizes just for the fun of it.   Organising competitions is a marketing tool.  Reasons for doing so are many.

It could be to draw your attention to the launch of a new product. The promoter may have added a new flavour to its existing range of pizza and a prize draw will alert your attention. 

They may want to ensure a new brand quickly becomes a household name so ensures repetition of its name by inviting you to see how many words you can make from its name.

Now you’re not going to spend hours doing that are you, without some sort of incentive.  The incentive of course is the prize.

Here’s a real life instance of how powerful a marketing and advertising tool competitions are…   Part 2

© Copyright  1993-2005 Lynne Suzanne www.win-with-lynne.co.uk


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About the author
Lynne Suzanne is a consultant, freelance writer and author of Win With Lynne Intaslogans, Pun-ch Lines! and  Win Your Fortune in Prizes.
FREE  Win With Lynne - How to Win Competition guide.
www.win-with-lynne.co.uk

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