"Pin" money, or how to improve your day with a few freebies and a little money

[donutsweeper]

Note: Most of the specifics here will be US oriented, but hopefully anyone can find the tips useful.

There are a lot of freebies and ways to earn a little cash available on the web that people can find quite easily. I've been actively doing this for years and it's amazing how much I've acquired with little to no effort on my part.

First off- go to your favorite store's website and see if they have a rewards program or a monthly email and register for it. Many, many places send coupons for birthdays. For my birthday I got a coupon for a free drink at Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Dunn Brother's coffee, a free entree at Noodles and some free makeup at Sephora. Many department stores offer percent off coupons as well. There also might be coupons to print off or request at these sites.

Also follow these sites on twitter and facebook, especially local stores, I've discovered several deals (half-off or BOGO or buy this get that free) that way.

If you're worried about spam you can create a free email at gmail (or the like) for this sort of thing. (Actually, it's not a bad idea to set up an email, twitter and facebook just for freebies and sweeps (sweepstakes aka contests) if you plan on actively looking for deals like this.)

In the US a great place for samples is walmart.com. Really. Right now on their main freebie page they're offering ones for Starbucks Via, Zantac, and Nivea body lotion and elsewhere on the site Bodycology bodywash.

As a note, when requesting samples or freebies from any site it is rarely required to sign up for their newsletter so be sure to uncheck the box for it if you don't want it. I also almost never download anything to my computer (although I've missed out on some excellent coupons because of this since sometimes they require a certain coupon printing program.) One thing I have downloaded is roboform, which is a perfectly safe form filling program so I don't have to type out my address and email and everything each time (there is both a free and paid version of this, the free one works just fine).

A lot with freebies and samples is timing. There might be 500 or 50000 to give out and either you get your request in at the right time or you don't. For example, in the past 3 weeks through twitter I've gotten a $10 Wendy's gift certificate and 2 coupons for free ice cream just because I saw the 'the next X number of people who tweet their favorite flavor' or 'the next X retweets of this' win tweet. A great firefox add-on for twitter is Echofon since it'll show a pop-up with new tweets every few minutes (and you can have more than one twitter account on it. I usually keep it on my sweeping/freebie account, but switch over to load up my donutsweeper ones regularly).

Right now a great twitter deal in the US is for AmazonVideo which is offering a $10 credit for use on certain things to all followers until 6/30.

Two places to sign up for FULL SIZED FREEBIES (or coupons for free products, depending) are http://pssst.generalmills.com/ and http://www.kraftfirsttaste.com/ neither will spam you they will just email you when you have an offer, maybe once a month or so. Things I've gotten from those sites this year include free frozen pizza, cream cheese, cereal, mac and cheese, cookies and other things I've forgotten.

If you want to earn a bit of money and maybe test products too the best survey site in the US is in one of its rare signup periods. http://www.pineconeresearch.com/signup/RR595DS1.asp It offers $3 paypal per survey and sometimes surveys lead to getting a product sent to you to try and then having another survey about it. (Products can be anything from shampoo to sanitary products to iced tea to gum). For this site surveys tend to take 20-30 minutes (I usually do them while I'm checking my friend's list or whatever) and they only send you one when you actually qualify for it so you only get them once in a while. I've been a member for YEARS and usually earn more than enough to pay for my LJ, although how many surveys you get will depend on age, occupation, family size, etc.

To easily find freebies in the US I highly recommend you sign up for a free account at http://www.online-sweepstakes.com/. They have a forum dedicated to freebies and usually only good ones are posted there and usually posted right away (useful for the 'only 500' sort of ones). If you want to try entering sweeps that is the best site for that as well, I've won quite a number of things via entering sweeps listed there.

There are a TON more tips and sites I could recommend, but this got long so I'll end this here. Feel free to ask me any questions you have!

Comments

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

COOL.

I also do www.e-rewards.com You don't get cash, but you get credit which you can use for stuff. I got a 25% off gift-cert for eBags and a free magazine subscription for doing surveys.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Glad you think this might be useful! That's a great site too. I was going to mention e-rewards and mypoints when I realized this got too long.

[pointytilly.livejournal.com]

The Pinecone link just gets me a login page—am I being clueless, or is it closed already?

My own survey experiences...SurveySpot has periods of being a pain and likes to send me lots of surveys that aren't relevant at all, but when I have periods of luck I can get a bit of money out of them. I got a thirty-dollar survey a bit ago, that was nice. GlobalTestMarket earning points takes forever, but the one time I got enough to cash in, they did indeed send me a check. Epoll takes a while to send surveys and rewards, but they do send them.

*goes to poke the free sample links* Thanks for those, free food is good :3.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

hmmm, try this:

http://www.pineconeresearch.com/signup/RR595DS1.asp

I do surveyspot too, but it's very hit or miss although you can make a decent amount of money but there is a high likelihood of spending 10 min on a survey just to be disqualified.

[pointytilly.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that worked. Thanks.

And I hate that. I wish surveys would just put the screening-out questions right at the start!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

that's why pinecone is great. You'll get the occassional 5 minute screener but if you get a long survey you're qualified already and you know you'll get paid for your time.

I'll do surveyspot, etc when I have time to kill or am bored.

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

This is a neat resource post, thank you! It sounds like you have to be fairly organized and willing to take some time, but you can get a lot of free things!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

You don't have to be super organized, especially if you sign up at kraft and psst, they email you. And if you check online-sweepstakes' freebie page once a week or so you'll still find out about many of the freebies. Even if you just hit the walmart page every once in a while you'll still find a few. I figure every sample sized shampoo (or whatever) I get is one less thing I have to buy. And if it winds up being a shampoo, etc I can't use I donate it to a food shelf or woman's shelter so everyone wins.

With luck you'll be able to get a few things here and there without much effort. :)

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

I used to do their stuff all the time, but I realized that I could usually find their credits on the coupon codes sites and that saving up for the big stuff didn't work because they periodically wipe your account.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

I've heard of people having those sorts of problems. I've never had an issue with mypoints and I like that there are a number of ways to earn points besides buying stuff

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

I use an old email account (from our cable service provider) for newsletters and promos from shops :D About an hour ago my husband was doing a bit of online housekeeping and - with his finger already over the delete button - asked me if I still used that account. Cue loud squawking from me!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

*phew* Good save there! Hubby almost got himself in a heap of trouble!