How To Be a Winner

Okay okay, you're all winners in my book. But some people have noticed that I tend to win a lot of giveaways. My mother-in-law makes fun of me because whenever she sees I have something new, my answer is almost always, "I won it in a giveaway."

But how do I win all this cool stuff? Well, today, I will tell you!

Here's my list of tips:

1. Enter A LOT of giveaways. You won't win anything if you don't try.
2. Enter low-entry giveaways. This is probably the reason I win--the odds are better. When I won the DonorsChoose gift card (my biggest win to date), I didn't know how many people entered. However, I knew that Bing Rewards didn't have a huge following yet (nowhere near as big as Swagbucks), and it was technically a raffle since it cost me a few points to enter. I could spare a few points, so it was worth it to me to enter. Raffles generally have better odds just due to the nature of them, but only you can decide if they are worth the sacrifice.
3. Only enter giveaways you actually want to win. If you don't want the prize and you can't think of anyone you would like to give it to, just save your time and skip it. (It took me over a year to figure this out, and I have an interesting re-gifting drawer because of it.)
4. If you like tweeting, make an alternate Twitter account. (You could do this with FB too, but it's technically against the TOS.) Most online giveaways will have you follow a handful of accounts, and if you actually like to use Twitter to 'talk' to people, it will soon get overwhelmed with all these companies hawking their wares. You can also easily get the extra entries given for tweeting, and that helps you keep track of what you have entered. If you don't use Twitter, you may want to think about joining just for entering giveaways.
5. Twitter parties. I've only won one thing from a Twitter party, and it was a small one (tip #2 again!), but they're fun anyway. I used to use TweetGrid for these, but now that it's defunct I don't do these so much any more because they're hard to follow. And use that alternate Twitter account so you don't tick off your Twitter regulars, especially if you're going to tweet a lot during it.
6. Follow a few key Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, or blogs that tell you when giveaways you care about are happening. This is how I find out about 90% of giveaways. When I won the Michael Bublé concert tickets, I found out about it because I followed a Twitter account linked to his tour. (Yes, I followed it on my main Twitter account. Follow your absolute faves on that one.) A best-kept secret blog is Tightwad in Utah, which lists low-entry giveaways (under 200 entries) every week. 

While I have indeed won a lot of giveaways, there is one type of giveaway that has consistently eluded me: cloth diapers. I've been trying since I was pregnant to win a cloth diaper, and those giveaways just seem to have so many entries that I never won and basically stopped trying. I haven't devoted much time to them lately since they weren't paying off. Now I only enter them if they're on a blog I actively follow.

My last piece of advice: karma. Give stuff to others and good things will happen to you. I worked with a woman who won lots of awesome stuff (including a trip to Vegas!), and someone mentioned to me that she is a generally nice person who would do anything for you if needed. I don't know how true this really is, but giving stuff to others is generally a good idea.

In that vein, I'm going to do a giveaway. Right now. And lucky for you, I don't have a huge readership, so this will probably be low-entry. (I haven't actually had a giveaway on here that had more than 300 entries.)

I'm giving away this Rachael Ray cookbook to one winner. Rachael Ray is awesome, but just not for me. This has been waiting to be passed on, and is in very good condition. I'll also throw in some hot cocoa packets, and based on what I can glean in way of details about the winner, I might even add in something random from the re-gifting drawer. Good luck, y'all!

Winner must be U.S. resident or APO/FPO address.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

And if you want to feel like a winner without technically 'winning,' try to snag some freebies! Hip2Save.com is my favorite blog for finding freebies (and no, they don't pay me to say that--I just love it that much). Another place to look is reddit's freebies forum. I love getting those surprises in the mail that I had long forgotten about!