Upromise “Back To School Pop Quiz Daily Prize Giveaway” and Bar-S $10,000 Back to School Sweepstakes are both offering multiple prizes to make it easier on your wallet as you get the kids ready to go back into the classrooms. It is definitely that time of year and "Back to School" sweepstakes are popping up everywhere as retailers do whatever they can to get your attention.

Be on the lookout for short running local promotions. Read the ads in your local newspaper carefully and keep an ear to your local radio stations. If you really want to get serious, then turn that dial frequently. Each radio station has a different set of clients and promotions you hear about on one station may not be on another. Another great source of local giveaways are the radio remotes where they broadcast live from a retail location. You only have a few hours to enter most of these and can frequently walk away with some very nice wins. One of the best starting places for finding information on what's happening in your area is your local sweepstakes club where members share information about local promotions. So, if you are alert and prepared to do a little footwork there are some wonderful opportunities in your future.

To find the sweepstakes mentioned above and other new sweeps featuring "back to school" prizes on the SweepsU.com Sweeps and Contests list, do a Custom search and type school in the Contest Name field. Remember you can now save these custom searches by clicking on the "Save" button in the top bar. A box will open in the left menu asking you to name your search. I named this one Back to School and clicked Save. Tomorrow morning I will click on "Saved Search" in the left menu and "Back to School" and all of the new and old sweeps and contests with the word school in the title will be listed for me. You can save as many different searches as you want and just delete them when you no longer need them. As always these features can be used on both the main list and within your own tracker.

Take care and win BIG!

Gwen Beauchamp

There are a lot of rumors floating around about people who enter sweepstakes on a regular basis and (OMG) win lots of prizes!  Some people say that all sweepstakes are scams and the winning stories they hear are put out by the scammers to lure new people in. Others say you have to be really “lucky” to win and don’t even try. And then there are those who tell me, “I entered one once, didn’t win, and knew it was a rip off!”

Well, I am living proof that all of these statements are incorrect! Sure there are scammers out there and you do want to be cautious about what you enter, but there are thousands of legitimate sweepstakes as well. Do you honestly believe that major companies would scam you? Come on, they are pedaling as fast as they can to get consumers to use their products. The last thing they want is bad PR. They will do everything possible to draw your attention to those products and that includes giving away some fantastic prizes. What may seem like unbelievable jackpots to you are just peanuts in the marketing budgets of major corporations. Marketing firms know that the way to get the public’s attention is to give them something to dream about and associate with the product they are trying to sell. Federal Law makes it very clear that once that promotion is advertised it must be completed right up to the distribution of the prizes listed in the rules.

As for being “lucky” in order to win, I spell luck…W-O-R-K! The old saying is very true; if you don’t enter you cannot win. I only win prizes from approximately 10-15% of the sweepstakes and contests I enter and the majority of those are lower level prizes (t-shirts, ball caps, CDs, etc.). The trick is to keep entering and don’t get discouraged. If you continue to enter consistently you are bound to win something along the way. There are methods to up your odds, just read some of my articles in the Sweeps University section of SweepsU.com to learn more about them.

So what about the people who say they gave it a shot and didn’t win anything? If a man goes fishing and doesn’t get a nibble the first time he puts his line and hook in the water, does he have the right to say no one really catches fish. Others couldn’t possibly have caught anything just because he didn’t.  That’s ridiculous, as are people who say they entered a sweepstakes once and didn’t win therefore all sweepstakes are just scams. Anything worthwhile requires a bit of time and persistence. You are not going to win everything you enter, but if you stick with it and enter consistently for several months there is a good chance that you will win something.

One thing that will help you in getting started is a good source of sweepstakes to enter and a system to keep track of them. That is where SweepsU.com comes in. We plan to launch the website by the end of June 2010 with a Community area that allows you to really get to know your fellow sweepers through Blogs, Forums and My Community, an up to date list of current sweepstakes, an absolutely one-of-a-kind Sweepstakes Management System (SMS) created by my partner, Gerald Anderson, and a Sweeps University section where you can read articles that will help to educate you on the “how to’s” of sweepstaking and contesting.

We are currently accepting applications for Beta Testers on SweepsU.com, but there is a waiting list. It will be several days before you receive an email invitation after you fill out and submit the Beta Tester application.  Once you are invited to log in you will have full access to all of the programs on SweepsU.com for just over a month before we launch the website. This includes well over 1,000 current sweepstakes on the Sweeps List that should help to get your sweepstaking off to an excellent start.

I can't wait to hear about all the wonderful prizes you win!

Gwen Beauchamp