Free competitions – an update…

I made a post on my site last week regarding entering free competitions online.

Thank you for everyone who commented, especially DC @ Young Adult Money who challenged me on my calculations.

And, I appreciate that DC. I do love being challenged.

 

What about multiple entries?

DC challenged me that I had ignored that you can gain multiple entries (sometimes upward of 100) in a very short space of time.

However, I’m still unsure of the benefits. Therefore, I decided that the only way to decide was to do some real research.

 

A week of competitions

So, I actually entered some free competitions over the course of a week, and recorded the time it took me to enter, and the final prize value and entrants:

Prize fund	Time taken	Entries earned	Total entries	Value of entry	Value per hour
$50.00	3	10	1201	$0.42	$8.33
$24.64	2	27	4191	$0.16	$4.76
$500.00	3	5	1171	$2.13	$42.70
$50.00	3	30	74148	$0.02	$0.40
$100.00	4	15	7948	$0.19	$2.83
$50.00	3	5	1126	$0.22	$4.44
$25.00	1	7	1087	$0.16	$9.66
$25.00	1	17	4000	$0.11	$6.38
$25.00	2	7	2378	$0.07	$2.21
$25.00	2	18	3845	$0.12	$3.51
$500.00	0.5	5	27036	$0.09	$11.10
$500.00	3	13	5503	$1.18	$23.62
$25.00	0.5	6	7478	$0.02	$2.41
			AVERAGE	$10.48

In my original post, I concluded that the average hourly wage was around $5.21 per hour against the minimum wage in the US of $7.25.

However, my new research shows that this is actually $10.48 per hour.

 

Cash prizes

I also noted in my original post, that you would have to resell items at a lower value that their RRP. Well, in my new research, I avoided this by only entering cash competitions or competitions for gift cards at places where I would normally shop. Therefore, the prizes represents the true value to me. This also saves me time in having to resell and incur resale costs which is a great benefit.

And I’m only a beginner…

Here, I just entered any free competitions that I stumbled upon that met the criteria. And you can see that the value per hour varies greatly (between $0.40 and $42.70 depending on the competition.)

As I did this more and more, I began to understand very rapidly which free competitions would give a high value per hour and those which wouldn’t.

Therefore, if I can see this at a glance, I could take out those poor earning competitions.

For example, in the table above, if I only entered the best 10 out of 12 free competitions entered, my average hourly wage would go up to $12.74. If I only entered the top 5, it would be better still at $22.78.

 

Where to look

If you are actively searching, the best value will come from the least popular sites. So try to avoid competitions on big sites and those which are linked to from other bloggers when you search “competition giveaways” on google.

However, if you are on the site anyway, you may as well enter as searching out a different site will probably take longer than the additional benefit in value per hour.

 

Here are some to get started

Other free competitions that are still active include:

Young & Adult Money – currently $58.09 per hour (ends 26/10)

Budget Blonde (and others) – currently $8.37 per hour

Making sense of cents – currently $9.59 per hour

 

Note that these per hour earnings will reduce before the competitions finish and may vary depending on your efficiency in entering these free competitions.

Come back soon to see a guest post from Kim @ Eyes on the Dollar, looking at the other side of the story – hosting free competitions & giveaways.

 

Finally, thank you DC for letting me see the error of my ways. Not stop wasting time reading this and go enter some competitions!! 🙂

Good luck everyone!!!

 

PS: I didn’t win anything in my research. Sad times.