How to Make Money Online with FREE Gift Cards
Saving Money by Shopping with Free Gift Cards
For my second article about creative ways to make money online we are going to be talking about how to make / save money by shopping with FREE gift cards. Now I know what you are all thinking, oh great, some scam article about gift cards.
Not at all. This is a method my fiancée has perfected to the point where in the past month she has got us about $300 in free stuff using gift cards.
As I mentioned in my first guide I am writing these articles to be straight to the point so that they do not require any technical savvy, so that way everyone can benefit from them.
The free gift card method is VERY easy to use and just requires you to keep your eyes open, get yourself in the right places at the right times (for some of them) and be creative with the ways you purchase things.
How Do I Get Free Gift Cards?
That’s a great question. As a matter of fact when my fiancée started doing this I asked her the exact same thing. One day I started noticing all this new stuff sitting around the house. The family room had been re-decorated, there was a digital picture frame on an end table, she had 3 new kitchen appliances, a bunch of stuff from Home Depot, etc.
I asked her where she had got all this extra money and she told me she bought it all with free gift cards. I responded to her “woot?”.
She went on to tell me about 3 methods she had been using in the past 2 weeks to get free gift cards.
I am going to outline each of her methods below so that anyone can benefit from her techniques because I was so amazed she had come up with something so crafty.
Method #1 – Shopping Receipts & Surveys
She told me that her first method was getting gift cards by filling out surveys mentioned on receipts she had received when she went out shopping. One great example of this is Target.
She had been shopping at Target and when she came home she was looking over her receipt. She is in marketing, so she tends to pay more attention to the small print than most people and she said after she finished checking the receipt she noticed a blurb on the back (in small print) about taking an online survey.
For completing the survey she would receive a $25 dollar gift certificate to Target. She went online expecting to waste half an hour and end up with nothing, or to get spammed from hundreds of mailing lists.
To her surprise she was not even required to enter an email address and was done with the survey 5 minutes later. I was standing there watching and laughed when I noticed it said “please allow 4-6 weeks for shipping”. I told her that was the catch right there.
Well 3 days later she came into the kitchen laughing at me and waving around her $25 dollar gift card that had arrived in the mail that day.
After this she started checking her receipts much closer, because she started seeing all sorts of promotional opportunities on them. Whether it was for gift cards or online discounts she noticed a lot of the major label stores out there were always running some sort of promotion or competition if you just knew where to look.
With this in thought in mind she pointed out she could even use receipts from friends because you were usually just required to enter a code from the receipt itself.
She pointed out that major label stores do this because it is cheaper than hiring a marketing firm to do these surveys for them and providing a gift card to their store ensures return business from that customer.
Well I could really care less about why they did it. We had just bought a house in the last few months, and we would need to go to Target anyway, so having free money to spend there was a huge bonus!
She continued to check receipts for a few weeks and managed to accumulate about $150 in free gift cards or promotions that we were able to use at stores we needed to shop at anyway. She told me the key was always reading the fine print and knowing where to look after having come across a couple of promotions.
Her advice was to always check the small print on the bottom and backs of receipts to find great promotional offers or contests. Because they are all through well known stores there was less worry about getting spammed, after signing up for these promotions.
The second method is more hit or miss but also provided free gift certificates that saved us some money.
Method #2 – In-Store Surveys and Promotions
The next time she came across free gift card opportunities she was out shopping with her mother. They were at another big label store and were stopped by a person asking if they would be willing to take a customer satisfaction survey. They offered her and her mother a $10 gift card each for taking a 5 minute in store survey.
Now this method may be harder to come across but she let me know that she has had pretty good luck with it by going to the mall to do her shopping. Especially on the weekends. In some cases there was nothing offered to her for taking the survey so she simply asked “What do I get for taking the survey” and all of a sudden gift cards were being offered. It’s funny how simply asking “what do I get” turns a marketing group from offering nothing, to giving you free stuff.
Once again she completed the surveys and was handed free gift cards on the spot. In the past month she has completed 3 different surveys like this, totaling about $35 in free gift cards.
The last method and probably the best to use has netted her around $300 in free gift cards and items. I wanted to save this one for last as it was the most creative and also the best method that she has come up with.
Method #4 – Credit Card Reward Points & Gift Cards
Now I know right off the bat here people are thinking “oh great credit cards and APR catches”. Let me stop you right there. This technique is probably the best I have seen and at most will cost you about a dollar or two in interest a month, while getting you hundreds of dollars worth of free gift cards.
In fact, let me mention that using this method has worked SO well for the both of us, that we have never paid more than a couple dollars in interest a month, and each have a credit rating of 800+ (The max is 850 if you are not familiar with credit ratings)
The key to getting free gift cards for credit card purchases is having a credit card with a great rewards program and always paying for stuff from your “savings”.
Now let me clarify what I mean by that. You will purchase almost everything you buy with your credit card, but when purchasing items you can only spend what you have money in your savings account to cover. You NEVER borrow!
Doing this will ensure that you are paying hardly anything in interest rates because you are constantly paying off your credit card. When I was initially building credit I used to only pay my credit card off once a month. Now I pay my credit card off whenever I have a balance on it.
The key here is having the discipline not to borrow money. Because that will defeat the whole purpose of this.
A great example of how this works is we were planning a vacation to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. We had been saving for two years and knew how much the trip was going to cost. We had saved up a few thousand dollars, but took our credit cards on the trip instead of debit / check cards.
The credit cards we had, gave you rewards points for almost every type of purchase you made and even more for things like gas, food, hotels, etc. (Depending on the company and the card). We spent quiet a bit of money on the trip, but as soon as we got home a week later we completely payed off the balance on these cards with the money we had saved up for the vacation.
Even so, we had still made all the purchases on these cards, most of which provided us with rewards points. When we got back and paid off the cards my fiancée went to the credit card website and started filling out the gift card forms to turn our points into free money.
Once again it said “please allow 4 to 6 weeks for shipping”. In less than a week we received about $250 in Gift Cards, along with another $150 dollars worth of free merchandise from remaining points. (ones that could not be redeemed for Gift Cards). Needless to say the gift cards helped out a lot with things around the new house, and all the free stuff was great too! My favorite is the 7″ digital picture frame we received.
Overview
That sums up the three main methods my fiancée uses to get us free gift cards. She has a knack for saving us money and this is one of her many ways.
I will try to list anything else she shows me in a follow-up guide. As I have said before I am trying to write some practical “how to make money” guides for people. These are not “get rich quick” schemes or “how to make millions”. They are habits that if practiced regularly, can not only save you a fortune, they can provide a lot of free spending money that can help out around the house.
Please check back for my future guides on practical ways to make money. If you liked this article please leave me a comment with a suggestions with feedback for future articles.
Thanks again for checking out Pseudorant! We appreciate the support!
How to Install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your Linux Box
Putting the AMP in your LAMP server
Hello and welcome! This is my first article / guide, so let’s get right into it.
This is intended as a guide for web developers who are new to Linux (namely Kubuntu) and wish to setup a local LAMP server on their machine. For those of you who don’t know, LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl / Python / PHP, although in this case the ‘P’ is for PHP only. When all four of these are installed on a machine, it is a full-blown web-server capable of running complex web applications.
In my case, I have installed Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my machine using the standard desktop installation, which does not come with Apache, MySQL, or PHP. To be specific, we will be using the following applications:
* Apache2
* MySQL 5
* PHP 5
All of these applications are available through the Adept Package Manager,which is a fast and convenient way to install and uninstall applications in Debian-based Linux systems. Click on the link above for a guide on how this works.
For simplicity, I will assume you know how to operate Adept and have installed at least one package before. Click on the K-Menu, go to ‘System‘, and select ‘Adept Manager - Manage Packages‘ from the list. When prompted, enter your root password and you will see Adept’s package manager interface.
Now, in the search bar, type ‘apache‘. After a short moment, you should see a list of packages. The very first one should be ‘apache2‘. Click on the arrow next to it and select ‘Request Install‘. Now, type into the search bar ‘mysql‘ and this time you will need to scroll down a ways to find the package you are looking for: ‘mysql-server‘. Click on the arrow and select ‘Request Install‘ again. I would also recommend selecting the package ‘mysql-admin‘ for a convenient GUI for managing MySQL server, but that is purely optional. Finally, type ‘php‘ into the search bar and scroll a ways down to find ‘php5‘. Once again, click the arrow and choose ‘Request Install‘.
After selecting these 3-4 packages (depending on whether or not you installed the MySQL Admin GUI), select ‘Apply Changes‘ at the top of Adept to install the packages. This may take a while, so now is an excellent time to take a break and get a drink.
After the installation is complete there is a couple of very important steps to take in order to save yourself a lot of frustration. The first and foremost, is to clear your browser cache! I’m not entirely sure why this is so important, but trust me, it is. If you are running Mozilla Firefox, go to the ‘Tools‘ menu, select ‘Clear Private Data‘, and uncheck everything except for the ‘cache‘ checkbox. You can clear out other information as well, but make sure cache is selected.
The other important step to take is to make sure that php files are parsing correctly. Go to your System Menu (the one next to the K Menu) and select anything, for example, ‘Home‘. The root folder is not in this menu, so you will have to navigate to the right folder anyways. For simplicity, select the ‘Home‘ folder from this menu.
On the left-hand side you should have a column labeled Bookmarks, with an option for Root. Select that, then click on the folder for ‘etc‘. Right-click on the folder named ‘apache2‘ and select from the ‘Action’ menu ‘Open as root‘. Enter your password to continue.
In this folder, select the folder ‘mods-available‘ and look for the file named ‘php5.conf‘. Right-click on this file and select ‘Edit as root‘ and make sure the second line says something like
‘ AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html .php .phtml .php3‘
In my case, all I had to do here was add ‘.htm .html ‘ before the ‘.php’ section. This is so that if you have PHP code inside an htm or html file, it will be parsed instead of showing the raw code.
Save your changes, and depending on which editor you used, you might want to delete the temporary ‘~php5.conf‘ file that it creates as a backup. It should not hurt anything to leave it there, but I like to delete the extra backup files to prevent clutter.
In any case, make sure to restart your computer at this point to make sure that the apache web server picks up the configuration changes. You can probably accomplish the same effect by just restarting the apache service, however I haven’t done that yet and restarting the system seemed like a simpler approach.
Alright, now we’re getting to the fun part! Open your favorite web browser and type in the address bar ‘http://localhost‘ to see if apache is running properly. If it is not, you can blame me and probably find some help on the official Ubuntu/Kubuntu forums, however if it is running, it should show the words ‘It Works!‘ in your web browser. We’re almost done now…
All web files will be hosted from ‘/var/www‘. To make sure php is working properly, we will need to first navigate to that folder. Select ‘System Menu‘ -> ‘Home‘, and then select ‘Root‘ from the bookmarks section on the left. Click on the ‘var‘ folder to open it and then right click on ‘www‘ and choose ‘Action‘ -> ‘Open as root‘.
In here, right-click on ‘index.html‘ and choose ‘Action‘ -> ‘Edit as root‘. Add this line right before the closing tag for the body (body tag > added line of code | below):
Save your changes, and refresh your browser window. You may want to clear your browser cache again, just to be sure. You should see ‘It Works!‘ followed by a neatly formatted table showing all of the current settings for PHP. If it did not, right-click on the page from your browser and click ‘view source‘ or whatever the option is called for your browser to see the HTML code directly.
If the output from view source shows the “?PHP” part of the code, then something is wrong. PHP code should never be sent to the browser without being parsed. If you haven’t already, try restarting your PC again, otherwise you are on your own (along with the thousands of others with similar problems). Again, I recommend checking the official forums for Ubuntu / Kubuntu.
Hopefully, all went well and you saw the neatly formatted PHP text. To make sure that MySQL is working correctly, I will assume you have the GUI installed. I said it was optional, and it is, but it’s the easiest way I know of for verifying that everything installed correctly. Go to the K-Menu, select the ‘Development‘ menu and choose ‘MySQL Administrator‘.
For the server hostname, choose ‘localhost‘. The login name will be ‘root‘, and the password is the root password for your machine. If you can connect OK, then all is well. If not, fall back on the official forums or google to find a solution, but I suspect that this will work right off the bat.
That’s all I have for this guide for now. There is a mountain of information for all three applications mentioned here, and this guide barely scrapes the surface of any of them. Expect some guides in the future for configuring Apache, MySQL, or PHP.
What Makes Content Valuable or Interesting?
What Adds Value to Content?
I have been thinking about this a lot lately for numerous reasons. I hope some people out there have noticed that I am working very hard to turn Pseudorant into a resource that will provide value for my readers. I have also been working on revamping the website where I work and studying ways to employ SEO to help our business do better.
All this work has had me questioning what types of content do users consider valuable? You can read a million guides online about how to promote a business, or advertise a website but once you get people there what will you show them?
I am currently experimenting with a lot of different types of content to see what people react best to as a sign that these topics are of interest to them. I am happy to see the “The BEST Looking “FREE to Play” 3D MMORPG List” is doing good, of the topics I have posted on the site thus far. I worked very hard on putting that list together and I plan to continue to update it so it will remain a useful resource for players in years to come.
I have been thinking of putting together something that is similar to the MMORPG list because it seems like users are getting a lot out of it. People seem to like having many resources laid out before them in one place. I think this has to do with a “convenience” factor for people.
When thinking about the types of things that add value to content I try and put myself in the position of the reader and ask myself what I would like to see on a site.
This is a hard question to answer because my interests are so varied. I really enjoy computers and games but it is hard to find an aspect of these hobbies to share with people that has not been discussed already.
I plan on doing a guide this summer on how to build the ultimate arcade machine. I know this has also been done, but I am going to structure mine so that anyone can follow it and build their own arcade machine with very little technical know how.
I am considering writing some technical guides for the site to walk users through how to troubleshoot common computer problems. I have done this in the past for the place I work at but unfortunately I don’t have the time to maintain the resource.
I guess the point of this rant is that I feel everyone is trying to figure out what makes content interesting to people? There doesn’t seem to be any set rule or otherwise there would probably be books about “How to create interesting content”.
Looking back on the article I wrote yesterday “What is Web 2.0? Web 2.0 is coming!” it really got me thinking about the content people are producing and how it is really hit or miss. There are a couple things I have noticed that I will be trying to study further.
01. People tend to like “resources” whether they are compilations of games or services that they can see as a whole, without needing to search multiple sites for the information they are after.
02. People like knowing the inside scoop, if you have a story that no one else knows and it is appropriate to post it, do so. People will come to your site since you are the only one with the information. Just make sure that your news is accurate so people do not think you are liar. (A good example of an accurate news scoop is my article on “Google to Open Midwest Office in Madison, Wisconsin“)
03. Buzzwords do not necessarily make an article interesting. Just because people are searching for information on something does not ensure it will be a highly viewed topic. My experiment with this was writing the article about Web 2.0. Some people where interested in this but the overall response was lukewarm.
04. Inflammatory statements get more attention than buzzwords. This is a given, we have seen this occurring for years in forums. I attempted to test this theory by writing an article called “Grand Theft Auto IV is the Root of All Evil!” The driving force behind the traffic to this article was not the buzzword “Grand Theft Auto IV”, it was the fact that it was being portrayed in a negative light in some peoples eyes.
These are just general observations I have made from tracking stats on my blog, and playing around with different article formats.
Am I doing this just to mess with people? Of course not… Pseudorant is an experiment for me to learn many things about myself, other people, computers and technology.
I have always had a deep rooted interest in the way people’s minds work. Maybe this is because both of my parents are social workers, or maybe it’s just because everyone enjoys knowing what makes people tick.
From the standpoint of a site designer, author or anyone producing content these are very valuable things to know. While writing a point by point guide on how to do things is meaningful, there is a lacking sense of accomplishment if no one ever reads your work.
I think that is one of the hardest things to get past when a person is starting a blog. I have really had to kick myself in the butt some days to come up with something to write. Not because I don’t enjoy doing it, but because I have other things on my mind and some days when no one reads a post it is hard to maintain that level of motivation.
I originally started writing this intending it would be a short blurb since I am actually pretty busy tonight, building a computer for a friend. This seems to have turned out to be more a guide that I figured it would be.
As I keep working on my blog I will continue to document any observations I make about people, my articles, trends, content and topics, as this may be useful to other people out there that are new to this, or have been doing it for years or are just having a little writers block.
I would be VERY interested to hear other people’s ideas about what makes content valuable to readers, the different things they have written, and the response those posts have received. This is something that I tend to obsess about lately.
It might have something to do with the fact that I have OCD, or it may be because it is something that actually requires a good deal of thought.
Either way I hope those who are checking out my blog are finding something interesting here and there, that makes this blog useful to you. Creating a resource that is valuable to you, creates value for me when I sit down and write an hour long article. I hope others feel the same way and continue to share their thoughts and ideas on how we can continue to improve on what we do.
Thanks for visiting Pseudorant.
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