Use Pinterest to Win Contests and Sweepstakes

Enter Pinterest Sweepstakes

The most direct way to win with Pinterest is to enter Pinterest sweepstakes. Some companies have started using sweepstakes to encourage people to "pin" their products and pages. The goal: to have the entrants' friends notice and be intrigued enough to click through to their website from the pins.

One way I've seen Pinterest contests offered is to ask people to "pin" a certain number of products onto a specially-named pinboard, then email the link to the pinboard to the sweepstakes' sponsor for an entry. While you need to have an invite to use Pinterest, anyone can view pinboards. Prizes are given for the best-looking pinboard, or entries into a random drawing are offered just for creating an appropriately-themed pinboard.

Get Additional Entries into Contests through Pinterest

Some sweepstakes, especially blog contests, are offering entrants additional entries for pinning the blog, the sponsor's blog, or the sponsor's products on Pinterest. The more entries you get, the better your chances of winning.

Track Sweepstakes You've Entered with Pinterest

One of the most difficult parts about winning sweepstakes is remembering which contests you've already entered, so you don't get disqualified for duplicate entries. Some sweepers have started using Pinterest to help. They create a pinboard for each month, and when they enter sweepstakes, they pin an image from the sweepstakes to the appropriate month. If they come across the sweepstakes later, a quick glance at Pinterest shows them they've already entered.

Track Sweepstakes You've Won with Pinterest

I like to use a spreadsheet to track sweepstakes wins, but if you find that too time-consuming, Pinterest gives you another way to track your wins. After you receive your win notification, return to the sweepstakes' website and pin an image from it to an appropriate pinboard. Note that there's one possible disadvantage to this strategy: some companies remove their sweepstakes pages after the entry period is over.

A variation of this idea is to pin the main page of the company that sponsored the sweepstakes. While that won't help you track the specific sweepstakes you've won, you can get a good feeling for the companies you win from.

Track Prizes You've Won with Pinterest

I love the idea of scrapbooking your prize wins, to help motivate you to win more. Looking back over the pictures of all the things you've done is fun and inspirational. And Pinterest gives you an easy way to collect images of your wins, without the fuss of glue and colored paper.

Just search for your favorite prizes online, then pin the images to a pinboard devoted to your wins. You could even submit a picture of yourself with your prize to my prize winners' photo album, then pin your picture when it's posted!

Use Pinterest to Create an Inspirational Vision Board

A vision board is a fun way for sweepers to keep themselves motivated to win by imagining the prizes they most want to win. The book, The Secret, recommends vision boards as a way to focus your positive energy. Pinterest makes it easy to pin the prizes you'd love to win, to help keep you motivated to enter and win.

Conclusion:

In short, Pinterest is a fun way to improve your chances to win sweepstakes, both directly, by offering a new way to enter sweepstakes, and indirectly, by helping to keep you inspired to keep entering, even when you're suffering through dry spells.

Pinterest isn't a site for sharing personal thoughts and details, like Facebook. Rather, it's for sharing things you like, books you've read, recipes you want to try, and yes, sweepstakes you want to enter. So there are fewer privacy concerns when using Pinterest.

If you'd like to try it out, visit Pinterest.com.