My longest dry spell for well over a year has come to an
end! Two (albeit modest) wins in as many days has certainly helped kickstart my
mojo and get my game back in to 2nd gear (let's end the car analogy there - I
seldom hit fourth and couldn't find fifth with a Haynes manual).
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| The first win of the last few weeks - which I have a feeling I'll be needing pretty soon |
I guess the simple fact is that nothing succeeds like success, and - by
extension - nothing sows the seeds of success like successfully sowing success
seeds (note to self: stay off the analogies, yeah?).
So, what are these success seeds? If I’m honest, they’re magic beans by any
other name. The first is that positive mental attitude I mentioned previously. Happily,
I hadn’t lost this along with my mojo, but as a little celebration of past wins
never hurts, I booked afternoon tea and champagne for me and my wife. I won
this voucher last December but couldn’t get a daytime babysitter until now. (And
given that - as every parent knows - getting a babysitter is a triumph in its
own right, I’m adding that to my win list too!)
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| Cash in the old wins ... for cake! |
As for the second seed, that’s the skeleton routine. You know, a super pared-down
autopilot routine that maintains some basic semblance of comping normality. For
me, that’s basically opening a set of comping bookmarks (local comp searches
and daily lotteries). These bookmarks take seconds to open and, at most,
minutes to close. Anything I do on top of this - whether catching up with
Facebook groups or hashtag searching on Instagram - is a bonus.
Speaking of Instagram, the other thing I've started doing again is comper stalking.
I'd forgotten all about this for the last few months. And what a time to forget
too - since I last looked, Instagram has much improved this facility, so you're
no longer restricted to the last 24 hours of an instagrammer’s life. They kept
that update quiet!
To be sure, stalking is also possible on Facebook and
Twitter, but I’ve always found it like panning for gold in a haystack (sorry -
I promised to stay away from the analogies didn’t I?). The sheer volume of
like-share and RT noise makes it nigh impossible to identify the low-entry
comps. Instagram by contrast, “has yet to be fully exploited by promoters”. A
correlate of this is that it is also yet to be fully populated by compers! It
is still possible to find comps with under a hundred entrants. Case in point: this
year I have won a Kindle and tickets to see Beyonce on Instagram, and in
neither case were there 15 entrants.
As luck would have it too, I’ve been laid up in bed for the
last couple of days (doctor’s orders!) so I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about
my comping game than I have over the preceding month. That’s not to say I recommend
minor surgery as a route to improving one’s winning streak, but if you’re
gifted an opportunity, don’t look it in the mouth!
How’s your summer
been? Has the hot weather tempered your comping game? How do get yourself back
up to speed when your mojo starts to splutter?
