Hey hippychic,
One piece of advice I have is be persistent, keep a positive attitude and appreciate even the smallest of wins. I used to enter every kind of dailies everyday, about 120 DVD dailies & approximately 60-70 other kinds of dailies. Another piece of advice is locals are your best friend. I win a lot of my prizes on locals, if you live in Toronto, don't enter them, I don't need any more competition
. I used to sweep about 4 hours a day, maybe more sometimes. I haven't been sweeping for a full year, but from what I hear the beginning of the year & the end of the year are bad for sweeping. Also, another negative thing about sweeping lately is, a lot of people are out of work, so more people are sweeping, which unfortunately is more competition which equals less prizes. Since the economy is poor, there are less good sweeps as well. Things will pick up eventually & I can't wait until they do. I don't enter Sweet Piggy contests, although I'll share them, since I find they look a bit spammy. I haven't head of New Woman, lol.
You can see my wins in my signature. I haven't updated, but I have won maybe 5 contests this month, nothing large, though I appreciate them all. I won the laptop on an instant win. It was the exact same laptop I planned on buying & it was from an instant win. I enter on the last day of the contest, wasn't even going to enter, was so excited. I enter every contest. I have made over $600 selling some of my prizes & have been able to buy lots of other stuff I want to buy. I have considered giving some of the prizes away as MOC's (Members Only Contests), but can't afford to ship the prizes right now. In a course of a month I probably enter over 500 contests.
As for expired contests, you can just leave them. Report a double posted contest if you see it, but the expired contests we usually go through once a week or more.
I won a local play prize pack, which included dinner & tickets to a show. Sold the tickets for $75 & took my friend out to dinner for her birthday. Her meal was over $50, so totally worth it! Another local I won was a skiing trip, which was awesome! The place was beautiful.