CHARITY worker Jade Cooper has made £1,500 and enjoyed amazing freebies including luxury holidays, a big-screen TV and VIP festival tickets, all thanks to her skills at entering competitions.
The 28-year-old from Cheshire takes just a few minutes out of her day to enter draws on social media sites Facebook and Instagram.
Jade started this lucrative side hustle three years ago, with the help of an online community of competition lovers.
“My friend started doing it and won some make-up in a competition and I realised it was worth getting involved in.
“I started doing some research and found that there are big groups of people who share competitions and ideas and tips to help out other people in dedicated Facebook groups,” she said.
Groups such as Free Competitions And Giveaways UK on Facebook see members sharing competitions for everything from spa breaks to bikes to holiday vouchers.
Jade also uses a Facebook page called Super Lucky and website The Prize Finder.
Jade’s first big win was a trip to a luxury hotel in Scotland for her and her mum and, since then, she has won holidays to Majorca and Portugal, and her biggest success of all – a trip to Malta with a massive £1000 spending money.
Add to this tickets to Creamfields festival and Leeds festival, where she was given a £200 bar tab, food vouchers and VIP tickets, as well as winning a new TV, a wide selection of vouchers, garden furniture, clothes and a pizza oven.
The trick is volume – she reckons that for around every 40 competitions she enters, she wins one.
“I enter competitions every day, sometimes up to ten, but it only takes seconds. I just go on my phone whenever I have a spare minute and like and share.
“Because of algorithms, they all just pop up and I get them on Instagram stories from different companies – it’s helping them advertise their business by sharing,” Jade said.
“I tag other people from the competition pages, and they tag me in with others – that way, we’re not annoying our friends by constantly tagging them!”
If she wins anything that she doesn’t want, Jade sells it, increasing her coffers even more.
“I’ve won clothes that don’t fit, so I sell them on Vinted, and I won some garden furniture that didn’t fit well in our garden, so I sold that for £300 on eBay.
“I also won a pizza oven that I didn’t think I would get much use out of – so I sold it for £200,” she said.
Jade is industrious in other ways too – alongside her full-time job for a local charity, she does market research and also takes on Uber deliveries whenever she has spare time – which nets her an extra £120 a week on average.
“I’ll do it over the weekends and in the evening. It’s so easy – you just turn on the app and wait for a notification that there is a job – then you go and do the delivery locally and get paid instantly.”
For any other aspiring competition winners, Jade says that it’s all about the community.
“Search and join all the different FB pages and Instagram groups and spend time networking with other people who do competitions – some of them have spreadsheets to keep track of everything – they take it very seriously!”.
Jade finds free competitions on the following websites
Instagram – she follows ‘The Competition Collective’ and there is also a page called Competition Finder
Twitter – Jade simply searches ‘UK competitions’. There is also a Twitter page for Competition Finders where all the latest prize draws are shared.
Websites – Jade uses the Prize Finder site. Other sites include Prize Bounty and Competitions Time.
Facebook – Jade is a regular user of Super Lucky. There is also the Free Competitions And Giveaways UK page.
Tiktok – she just searches ‘UK competitions 2024’ to find all the latest giveaways.
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