In 1988 I wrote a poem that very literally changed my life. That poem resulted in my husband, Robert, and I winning a "Disney Wedding On Ice". It was a fairy tale beginning to a life filled with prizes and experiences we had never before dared to dream of. But it didn't just "happen". It was not because we were "lucky".  After our "Wedding", I didn't even enter to win anything for over a year. But my second win was another big one!

The Coca-Cola and Fox Isle of Dreams Treasure Hunt Cruise (November 5-12, 1989) was both a local and a national sweepstakes with 15 cruises being given away in my metropolitan area and 500 throughout the U.S. and Canada. It was luck that I found the promotion, filled out the forms  and mailed them in, but I soon learned that I had lucked into a winning strategy.

• Locals receive fewer entries than nationals and offer you the best chances of winning
• Mail-ins give you a better chance, because fewer people will take the time to fill out both an entry form and an envelope and pay for postage to mail it in.

Our next lesson came while sailing the Caribbean aboard Carnival Cruise Lines MS Jubilee. Five hundred winners included a lot of people who had been entering and winning repeatedly for years.  We heard story after story that week from sweepers all over the country about the incredible prizes they had won. We learned about sweepstakes newsletters and received information on every aspect of entering and winning both sweepstakes and contests. By the time our ship returned to Miami, Robert and I were both excited at the prospect of what our future might hold.

That was well over 20 years ago! Those first lessons in sweeping were put to very good use. We have now won 12 cruises, most recently the Bud Light Port Paradise cruise (October 2009). This hobby has been extremely good to us, but once again, let me stress that luck is only a small part of the winning process. In the old days you needed a good newsletter, but back then we did not have the World Wide Web. Your best tool in this new world of internet access is a good sweepstakes website that gives you a source of current promotions to enter, a forum to interact with your fellow sweepers and programs to simplify and organize the sweepstaking process. It is our goal at SweepsU.com to provide all of this and more to enable others to create their own "only in sweepstaking" adventures.

Gwen Beauchamp

To read more of Gwen's tips for entering sweepstakes and contests check out her articles in Sweeps University.