Summer is only half over, but retailers across the country are gearing up to get the business of parents preparing their children for another year of school. Sweepers should be on the lookout for national and local sweepstakes from marketers selling clothing, school supplies, books, computers and dorm room merchandise. Your local malls and radio stations are sure to be promoting special events with lots of prize giveaways. Be Ready!

On the National sweepstakes scene we already have some good ones showing up. At the top of my list are the A&F Sweepstakes, a&f kids sweepstakes and the Hollister Co. Sweepstakes. All three promotions started on Saturday, July 16 and run through August 5th. The a&f Sweepstakes and Hollister Co. Sweepstakes are giving away 12 Apple MacBooks each and every day, but you must visit a participating store and pick up a game card with a code before you can enter online. That is 252 MacBooks per store being given away! The a&f kids Sweepstakes is handing out 12 Apple iPods a day and you must also be between the ages of 7 & 14 to enter. You must visit a store to receive a card to enter this one as well.

Details on how to enter the a&f Sweepstakes, Hollister Co. Sweepstakes and a&f kids Sweepstakes are on the SweepsU.com Sweepstakes and Contest list. To find them quickly, do a Custom Search by typing a&f or hollis in the Contest Name field.

Gwen Beauchamp

Luck is spelled W-O-R-K!

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.

I have got to learn to use Twitter!!! Sweepstaking is evolving and if I don't keep up I'll be left out on some great prize winning opportunities. But...I have been banging my head against the computer in my frustration with this latest way to enter sweepstakes. It's okay folks, my computer wasn't hurt. I just can't seem to figure it out on my own and all I've gotten out of trying is this silly little jingle going through my head. It's from a McDonald's commercial back in the 80's with a bunch of kids from Camp Nippersinker, wearing raincoats and chanting...

We are Nippersinkers, we're in luck,

If it rains all day, just pretend you're a duck!

Waddle-Waddle, Quack-Quack, Waddle-Waddle, Quack-Quack!

So here I sit at my computer with that chant coming back to haunt me. I can't get it out of my head, so as the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...

We are sweepers and we've got the pluck,

To learn new ways to increase our luck,

Twitter-Twitter, Tweet-Tweet! Twitter-Twitter, Tweet-Tweet!

No, I haven't lost it! After writing my own silly jingle I moseyed on over to www.twitter.com and signed in to my account, but after that...I * AM * LOST! It looks like a foreign language - I don't even know where to start. But this time I took it to the top. I asked the great GOOGLE.! I typed in "twitter how to" and the great GOOGLE did not disappoint.  It pulled up 356,000,000 articles that matched my search. I'm still working on the first 10, but so far they are great.  Step by step details on what to do and how to twitter with a few videos as well. I should be a twitter expert by the time I get through all of these and I only have 355,999,993 to go!

Gwen Beauchamp