Freebie Tips

This was emailed to me by a friend.

Rules:
1: Never expect an offer to arrive in less than 60 days.
2: If it does not arrive in 60 days, forget about it. You may get a surprise later.

The world wide web of free stuff offered on the internet is interesting, bizarre, and very unreliable. Expect the unexpected.

While most, if not all, of us would like to fill our treasure chests with valuable goodies obtained for free, it saddens me to have to inform some of you that you will often be disappointed. This just may not be the place to get your holiday gift giving needs filled.

It will often take 60, 90, 120 days or even much more, and than something will appear in your mail or at your door you do not even remember ordering while you ponder to yourself, significant other, or favorite pet the how, what, and why's of this thing you received arriving in your mail. Free Stuff rarely arrives in a timely manner. Patience young one.

Second, you will not receive much of the free stuff you request. Companies have anywhere from a few, to a few thousand items to give away, and once the offer becomes "known", they may be inundated with 20,000, 50,000, or many many thousands more requests. They never, ever expected the responses they receive.

So many of them, if not most, forget about it, send out what they have, and that's that. So always respond promptly to free stuff offers. Failure to be quick with your fingers and connection will result in failure to receive the goodies. And just because you signed up, perhaps even receiving a confirmation email, does not mean it will be shipped to you.

Other companies that can afford to, and/or value their reputations and integrity, will run out and re-order the freebie to meet their requests. Again, often it's something made in a foreign land and may take many many months.

And in this economy, many more just can no longer afford the expense.

Maybe you will receive your freebie, maybe you won't.

Meanwhile, keep at this new found hobby, and don't become discouraged. Sooner or later, something really good comes along, and makes everything worthwhile.

There are tons of freebie offers on the web, this guide keeps you making sure you are only finding the best ones:

Look at who is making the offer. Does it seem like a legitimate company? I often check the domain of the site to see if the company actually registered the freebie offer site. http://www.domaintools.com

Look at the Web site. Is it professionally done or does it look like someone threw it together just to get something online? Is it full of Google ads? Generally companies with legitimate free samples don’t put Google ads on their sites.

Check that the site has a privacy policy that tells your personal information is handled. Does it say they will not sell your email or information?

Is the offer is free with no shipping and handling charges or with shipping and handling charges that are relative to its value. Skip free items that have excessive shipping charges.

If you don’t feel comfortable with an offer just ignore it.

Don’t provide more information than you wish to.

Use an alternate email that you only use for freebies and possible junk email sites. This way you protect your main email account. You can get a free email from many places. My favorite is Gmail. Gmail seems to filter out the majority of spam emails as well.

Only give out the information that MUST be filled in for you to get your free items. Protect your phone number. You shouldn’t have to give out your phone number for most freebies. I have a redirect phone number that I use for such times. If the phone number is not a required field then I always skip this. Same with your email. If you don’t have to provide that information, then don’t.

Look to see if there is an opt out or opt in check box. You don’t need to sign up for extra email. Uncheck that box unless you really do want more email from that company.

I always skip all sites that require my email prior to giving my address. This is an email harvesting site. Most likely you will also be requested to fulfill offers prior to getting your free thing. That makes the free thing not so free and will most likely be costly in spam email.

This is a terrific tip! I usually receive something every day, because I reuqest so many things!