Why not use an automatic form filling service to enter sweepstakes?

Automated form filling services claim to be able to use an automated process to submit your information to hundreds, maybe thousands of promotions a day.  By shear number this should increase your odds of winning a prize, right?

You'd think so, but there's a lot more to it.

Look at the rules for nearly any promotion and there will be a clause in there that says

Use of any automated program to enter will result in disqualification. 

So first and foremost, you're breaking the rules.


But what if you're not concerned about that?  What if you'll take the prize and not feel guilty about it?


Well, it's not that simple.  Nearly every promotional agency worth its salt has many layers of very sophisticated ways to detect and automatically disqualify entries from automated entry methods.


So in the end you're paying a service to submit "hundreds or thousands" of registrations (Do you really know how many they really are submitting and to what promotions?) most of which will never even count.


The registration service gets their money -- they win.  You don't.


There are only two ways to consistently win prizes from these games.  One is by becoming an expert, reading blogs and posting on message boards and spending a lot of time each day on your hobby.  The other is by using Win.ly, which will allow you to spend just a few minutes a day and quickly enter just the games worth entering.  


Of course the experts could also benefit from Win.ly.  :-)

Q&A: What's the difference between a sweepstakes, an instant win and a contest?

A lot of people use the term "contest" (or sometimes "sweepstakes") as a catch-all for any online, rules governed promotion that is giving away prizes.  But there are really three main types of these promotions.  And knowing the differences is very important for knowing which ones to play.

Note we are excluding things like "giveaways" and coupon offers in which everybody who registers and meets the requirements gets something.  We are concentrating on the "many will enter, few will win" type promotions.

Contest

The game is a "contest" when it is based on some sort of skill rather than random chance.  These games usually have you submit something like an essay, a photograph, a video, etc. and then judges select the best entry or entries and they receive the prize or prizes.

These tend to allow one entry during the game.

Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes collect entries during a period of time, then perform a random drawing to determine the winner or winners.

These can vary in their entry frequencies, from "unlimited" to "daily" to "once" to even "once per period".

Instant Win

Instant wins, as the name implies, let you know whether you won immediately after playing.

Most instant wins "seed" winning times evenly throughout the period the game is running and generally the first person to play after that time wins.

Most instant wins tend to be daily entry although other variations exist.

Summary

As you can see, contests can be tough unless a) you are extremely good at the subject matter of the contest or b) you happen to know that there aren't very many entries (because you use Win.ly).

But keep your eye open for contests that might be tough to enter due to the complexity of the subject matter.  They often get very few entries and can be worth the effort.

Sweepstakes are tough for two reasons.  They tend to have more people vying for a small number of prizes, and you're totally at the mercy of who comes in after you.  You might find a sweepstakes that no one knows about and get your entry in without much competition, and then two days before the drawing, word gets out and an avalanche of entries comes in and buries yours.

That's the great thing about instant wins.  If you identify one that has good prizes and few people playing, you can cash in immediately.  Win.ly consistently has instant wins among the highest rated for this very reason.

Q&A: How do I know which games have the best chance for a BIG prize?

Win.ly premium membership provides two main views of the rankings. 

The default view is by chance of winning any prize.  It's our opinion that this is the best way to go.  You'll do better in the long run by winning as many prizes as you can and not worrying about the size of each individual one.

But there is also a "Dollar Weighted" view available.  This will take the dollar value of the prizes into account also.  So for example, a game that's giving away a hundred thousand tiny chocolate bars might rank pretty high on chance of winning a prize, since there are so many of them.  But if you switch to dollar ranking it may show up lower in the list since the dollar value is smaller.

Sophisticated users will access both views to figure out their core list of promotions they want to enter, mark them as "Likes", then play as often as they can using the "Only my Likes" view and the built in last played and total play counters.

Try it out next time you log in to Win.ly.

Get Win.ly Premium For Free With Our Referral Program

A program that is proving very popular with online instant win, sweepstakes and contest players is our referral program.  What's different from many other referral programs is that you don't have to actively recruit people, or send emails to all your friends (unless you want to) or really do anything besides get your link out there and see who clicks on it.

When logged in to Win.ly, just click on My Account at the top and then the Referral Program tab.  You'll see your personal Win.ly tiny url listed.  Take that url and put it anywhere you like.  In your forum signature, on your Twitter profile, in your blog, email it to friends, post it to Facebook, Tweet it out as often as you like, whatever you like.

Anyone who sees your link and clicks on it and then signs up for a paid subscription will get you an extra free month of Premium subscription to Win.ly.  If twelve people happen to come through you could have full access to which Instant Wins, Sweepstakes and Contests are statistically most likely to win you a prize.

Don't miss out on this opportunity.  It really works.

http://Win.ly

Anatomy of a high ranking sweepstakes (and a low one)

Looking at two promotions on either end of the Win.ly Rating Engine scale gives good insight into the advantages that the automated ratings give.

First let's look at "The Dollar General Fresh Start Sweeps", which is currently at the top of the rating list by a wide margin.  Actually one of the highest ratings in the history of the engine.  [The engine has been running since the summer of 2009]

What are the key factors?

First of all: number of prizes.  Holy Moly.  Over 20,000 prizes (Worth almost a half million dollars in total).

Second: duration.  Only about a month.  That's well over 600 prizes given away every day.

Third: traffic.  This site is showing very low traffic estimates.  So there are relatively few people competing each day for those 600 prizes.

That's a recipe for a really good chance of winning a prize.

Now one stipulation here that's an interesting point.  This is a sweepstakes, with a drawing after the end.  So even though your chances are great now, you still have the risk that a ton of people can play after you and reduce your chances before it gets to the drawing.  That's the big advantage of Instant Wins, you are playing against the current traffic, not the total traffic of the entire game period.

[Note, between the time we originally drafted this post until this morning, the traffic has already greatly increased.  It's still at the top of the ratings, but now just barely.]


Now compare this to "Game Z" [name withheld for politeness] with one of the worst ratings on the list.

This is a sweepstakes for one prize.

It runs for nearly eight months.  Prizes per day?  That comes to less than .005 as an average.

And it lives on a site that is getting HUMONGOUS amounts of traffic.

Rough estimate of traffic is about 3 orders of magnitude more than what we were seeing with Dollar General.  "Orders of magnitude" is a somewhat technical term, but for simplicity sake we'll call that about 1,000 times more.

Simplifying quite a bit for a rough estimate, you have 1,000 time more people per day competing for 130,000 times more prizes (on average per day).  So that's (shockingly) 130 million times better chance of winning a prize on Dollar General.

Yes, you read that right.  130 million times better chance of winning a prize.

Now, there are a lot of estimates in there.  The broadest is the site traffic.  It's certainly possible that "Game Z", although getting thousands of times more traffic per day is only getting hundreds, or even tens of times more actual game plays.

But even at "tens of times" more actual game plays, we're still looking at 1.3 million times better chance.

This, my friends, is the value of Win.ly.  Are you wasting your time on "Game Z"?

How to use Win.ly with the free membership

At the free level of membership, you don't have access to the Rating Engine results, but you still can take advantage of the management tools to gain an advantage in your prize hunting.

First a quick summary of the tools available, then a strategy on how best to use them.  The tools:

• In the main listing:
• Ability to view by type (Instant Win, Sweepstakes, Contest or Other)
• Ability to view only your likes, all but your dislikes, or all.
• Ability to search on keyword.
• When you're visiting a game
  
• Ability to mark contests as "I won", "Like" or "Don't like".

So a good strategy would be this.

On your first day:

• If you're an experienced player, search for your favorite sites with the keyword search, visit them (and play) and mark them as "Like"
• For all players, from the main listing, set the type to "Instant win".  Instant wins generally provide the best chances at winning prizes so it's the best place to start.
• Peruse the listings and play games that interest you. Look for brands that you use and like, prizes that appeal, etc.  Also look for games that are receiving a lot of likes from the rest of the community (as shown in the orange bar graphs).  As you play these games, mark them as "Like" if it's a game you want to continue to play or "Don't Like" if you don't want to play again.  If you're not sure, don't mark either.
• Return to the listing and do the same for Sweepstakes if you have time (there's generally way more sweepstakes than instan wins) and contests if you're interested ("contests" here meaning games where you have to submit something like an essay or a photo and there is some judging element).

Each day afterword.

• Return to Win.ly daily, log in to the listings and set the type to "Instant Win" and the likes setting to "Only my likes"
• In the listings, for each game you'll see a count of how many times you've played plus a date and time when you last played.  This makes it easy to go through the list and play the daily games.  As soon as you visit the site, your listing will be updated to "Today" so you know you've already played today.
• Repeat for sweepstakes, contests and others if you choose.
• Then look for new sites.  Set the type to "Instant Win" and the likes setting to "none of my dislikes".
• Look through the listings.  New listings (added within the last 5 days) have green borders and are marked "Recently Added".  Also review games that you were undecided on before that you may want to add to your likes.

By using this process you can have a really solid routine for making sure you play the games you like (and just don't forget about them) and work new ones in.

Plus you can see some neat statistics. Like when you do win a prize, you can see exactly how many times you played before you won it.

Planned additional features:

We plan on adding a list of your wins to the "My Account" section.  That way you can track them and check them off when they arrive.  (Or follow up with them if you don't receive it).  It's also a handy automated way of keeping a list of your winnings, as many gamers do, instead of keeping a manual list.

Possible new feature:

Display for each game its entry frequency (Once per day, one time only, etc.).  We're interested in feedback on whether this would be useful.

Q&A: Why join Win.ly if I already play lots of online games and win?

It's all about time

Remember, Win.ly is not only a tool to win more prizes, it's also a tool to save time.

Just as it makes sense to play the games with the best chance of winning prizes, it's a waste of time to play games that have astronomically bad odds of winning.  And there are a lot of them out there.

Plus, there's bound to be a highly rated game or two that you didn't know of from your other directories.

So think of Win.ly as a way to play instant win games and sweepstakes smarter.  You'll win at least as often, but using only a fraction of the time.  And could quite possible win a lot more.

Plus, you'll play more consistently  The Win.ly tool makes it easy to track when you last played an instant win and make sure you hit it every day.  It also makes it easy to flag a set of games as your favorites and make sure you play them as often as the rules allow.

How many chances to win are you losing because you forgot to play a given day?  Or you forgot that a certain instant win game allowed you to play every hour and you were only playing once a day?