Sweepstakes Tips

Sweepstakes Tips
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Understanding Odds

With nearly anything you do, it always pays to do things the right way. Sweepstakes are no different. While winning the prizes is great and fun, Mr. Sweepy thinks winning more and bigger prizes is better!

Over a period of time, I will be giving tips and ideas to help you win prizes. The tips will range over a broad area about the internet, what sweepstakes to enter and more.

Here is a list of some of the things I will discuss:

• Email addresses
• Odds of winning
• The type of sweeps
• What not to enter
• What prizes do you want to play for?
• Sweepstakes rules
• Privacy and Terms of Service Agreements
• Required information and personal information
• What to give and not to give
• Volunteered information and survey questions
• Computer tips
• Organizing your sweeps
• Time management
• When you win, what will happen
• Affidavits, also know as Affy's
• Taxes - Uncle Sam is your new friend!
• The myths about luck and odds
• Thank you letters

If you have a question that you are looking for, you can also go to the Forums and post a question to the members. If I can get to it, I will.

Tips: Email addresses

Before you begin to enter the sweeps, you might want to read this tip first. The one thing in common with all online sweepstakes is that you need an email address. When you open up your internet account with your provider, you receive one or more email addresses. However when you enter sweepstakes, it's advisable to get a dedicated email that is referred to as "junk email address."

This is a different email address other than you personal email address. This eliminates mixing your personal email from your sweepstakes email and will not affect your chances of winning. This also protects against unwanted emails mixed in with your personal emails. There are a handful of websites that offer free email address. The best two is Hotmail and Yahoo. They offer better security and bulk mail folders with you will find helpful.

High quality companies I have found generally do not sell email addresses but this is not guaranteed. Simply, they understand their can be a lawsuit over this issue if they do. Secondly, if they did sell off your email address, they would be violating their own privacy agreement.

I have use my current junk email address now for my sweeps that I use for nearly two years with no spam. I do receive newsletters from the sponsors. If I do not want to receive the newsletters, I "opt-out" of them. It's that simple.

The spam I received in the past with another junk email addresses was the result of high risk sweeps. These are companies who are mostly internet based and they consider your email address as an asset. What is insulting is that their prizes are small most of the time. These are some of the reasons why I will not offer unknown companies and their sweepstakes on this website.