Just a reminder that you only have a few days left to take the super-short HIF user survey and be entered to win one of two $25 gift cards. A few thousand Hiffers have taken the quiz as of today, so if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?!
The May HIF survey was of immense help to me. I’m still in the process of setting up some new features thanks to the responses I received in it, but I thought I should go ahead and roll out another survey. In fact, since I figure to use surveys to help improve HIF over the next few months, I went ahead and bought a professional license with Survey Monkey. Not only is their software easier for me to work with, but it doesn’t have any annoying glitches like the previous survey had.
The previous survey was focused on improving HIF through certain settings and surfing habits. This survey is more focused on you, the reader. All questions on the second page are optional, but will help in finding new freebie offers. To protect privacy, the only identifying feature needed is an e-mail address (feel free to use your “freebie” e-mail address) and the entire e-mail results field will be deleted altogether once prize winners have been selected. Furthermore, IP addresses are not being logged nor kept in any way.
As for the prizes, I’m giving away two $25 gift cards again! Like before, the winners will be able to choose which store (Walmart, Amazon.com, etc.) the gift cards are for. The survey will close at noon on July 1st, so you have a little over a week to answer a dozen or so questions. Shouldn’t be too hard 
So please go take the current HIF user survey and feel free to leave any questions in the comments.
The HIF survey is now complete and I’m happy to say that we had almost 5,000 people take it, which is approximately 4,900 more than I predicted! I’m still in the process of reading all of the suggestions, but some of the things I was able to learn just by looking at the numbers include:
The biggest change will be posting in-store freebies as soon as we find out about them, as 74% of you wished we did. As you may have noticed, we’ve already started doing so this week.
A figure even more shocking to me was that a mere 3% of you said we should only be posting long-term freebies (that is, freebie that are available for many months) once. Seriously, that low number stunned me. But, as you’ll see starting later today, I’ll be taking the voice of Hiffers into consideration!
Way too many people (25%) answered “what newsletter?,” which means I’m doing a horrible job of pointing out that we have a free daily newsletter that goes out once a day jam-packed with freebies. I’ll do a little tweaking of the sidebar later this month to make it stand out a bit more.
There are 300 people out there with HeyItsFree.net tattooed on their foreheads. I want pictures.
And finally, entries 3090 (Chanthy) and 1604 (marva) were the big winners of the contest. I’ve e-mailed them both and if I don’t hear back from them within 48 hours, I’ll pick new numbers. Thanks again to everybody who took the survey and there will be another one in the upcoming days.
The freebies have been a little (Goob’s mind: define little!) slow lately and thus I thought I’d kick things off by giving away two $25 giftcards to two random Hiffers. All you have to do is take an 11 question survey about HIF to be entered! And heck, two of the 11 questions are your name and e-mail.
As for what the gift cards will be for, each winner will have his/her choice between a $25 GC to Amazon, eBay, or direct Paypal deposit. I’m flexible (and amazingly awesome?) like that. In fact, depending on how many people participate in this (hint, hint), I might make this a monthly thing.
So go take the survey and be entered to win a $25 gift card! The survey ends at midnight PST on June 2 and the winners will be chosen by Random.org.
(FYI: If you’re having trouble getting the survey to work, let me know here in the comments. I’m using the best “free” program I could find, but if I get a million and a half complaints, I’ll shell out a few hundred bucks for a professional service.)
EDIT: For some reason, #6 is not allowing people to input any answers other than the ones I selected and I can’t seem to fix it. Other than that, the survey is going strong. Reading through the answers so far has been a bit enlightening!
With March Madness coming to an end Monday night, the results of the contest are in!
Group 1
1st Place ($50): letsgospartans
2nd Place ($25): Brutus
Random Winner ($25): Going for the Money
Group 2
1st Place ($50): Marquette
2nd Place ($25): the1
Random Winner ($25): BettingLine
Unfortunately, over half of the winners masked their e-mail address from me, so I can’t contact them. If you were one of the winners listed above and haven’t received an e-mail from me, please go to the group homepage and near the bottom you’ll see a section that says “Recent Messages.” Just post there with an e-mail address that I can contact you at. You need to do this instead of just e-mailing me directly to prevent any scalawags from impersonating you.
I hope everybody had fun (I know I did!) and the next contest shall be starting shortly.
So, Yahoo screwed us. Hey, that’s a fun way to start a post, isn’t it?!
Long story short, Yahoo glitched and switched the scoring system for our first group, so I’m gonna be treating each group separately and giving out two first place prizes and two second places prizes. I know, I know, I rock.
Short story long, click below to read more.
I’m making a reminder post about the March Madness Contest today simply because the deadline for submissions is early tomorrow morning before the next newsletter will go out. Games start tomorrow afternoon! My productivity is about to plummet! Woo hoo!
I’m happy to say that 500 people have already signed up! Unfortunately, Yahoo only let’s 500 people in a group, so I’ve created a 2nd official March Madness group that currently has 23 people in it. If you’ve already joined the first group, do not join this second group! Scoring will be the same and we’ll just act like both of these group are one giant group.
If you want to know how the scoring works or what prizes are being given away, check out my original post. And with that, enjoy the games!
EDIT: Wow, 500 people have signed up! Unfortunately, Yahoo only let’s 500 people in a group, so I’ve created a 2nd official March Madness group. If you’ve already joined the first group, do not join this second group! Scoring will be the same and we’ll just act like both of these group are one giant group.
Now that the official bracket has been determined, I’ve set up a March Madness group for HIF on Yahoo for anybody who wants to participate! Doing so is super easy, even if you know absolutely nothing about college basketball (like me!). Simply click the yellow “Join Group” button, fill out your bracket for who you think will win each game, and earn points for each correct pick you make. Scoring will be as follows:
In addition to those points, you’ll get a bonus point for every correct upset you pick. The games start on March 19, so hurry up and fill out your bracket!
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the prizes!
If you win, you get $50. If you come in second, you get $25. And then I’ll pick a random person who participates, no matter what place they come in, to get the final $25. In conclusion, how can you justify not participating?!
And last, but certainly not least, I forgot to mention that we did finally get in touch with a winner for the $50 Amazon giftcard that I gave away two weeks back. The initial winner never contacted me after a week’s worth of e-mails, so I went to the first runner up, which happened to be HiccupQueen! So congrats to her and thanks to everybody who entered 
I don’t have a photo of this gift card, but that’s only because I bought it on-line. I guess I could take a picture of my computer screen or maybe create one of those cool Matrix graphics where you can see the inside of electronics, but…nah, that’d take too much work. Just take my word on it; I’ve got a $50 Amazon gift card that I’m dying to give away!
Some people have asked that I make a contest for those of you who are technologically illiterate. And you know what? That I can do. Thus, in order to enter this contest, all you have to do is….sign up for our daily newsletter. That’s it! Well, you’ll need to comment on this post and let me know you’ve signed up, but that shouldn’t be too hard, no?
The contest ends at midnight on Tuesday March 2. After you enter your email in the link above, you’ll get a confirmation letter with a link in it asking if you really want to sign up. Make sure you click that link to confirm your subscription!
So, to recap:
Good luck, everyone!
EDIT: If you’re already a subscriber of the newsletter, then just comment on this post and that’ll be your official entry!
(I refilmed this earlier today and cut it down to about 6 minutes, but YouTube is taking forever to get it uploaded and I don’t feel like waiting any more, so you get the extended cut! Also, I messed up in the video and said the coupons expire on December 31, when in fact they expire on November 1. Still, plenty of time to use them!)
Get your Entertainment 2009 Coupon Book here.
For those too lazy to watch the video above or maybe who can’t because they’re at work, read below for a quick recap:
So I’ve got a $50 Target gift card just sitting here and not being spent, so how about we remedy that? In order to win, all you have to do is follow Hey, It’s Free on Twitter and tweet the following message below:
Goob is giving away a free $50 Target giftcard! You can win by following @heyitsfree and retweeting. http://bit.ly/14tRIa
The contest will end this Sunday night at 11:59pm and the winner will be randomly selected from the people who are following Hey, It’s Free on Twitter. Fingers crossed Random.org doesn’t somehow try and force me to win my own contest again
I decided to film myself picking the winner for the free Walmart $50 giftcard this morning. The results are below. If you can’t get the video to play, a synopsis and links mentioned in the video are available after the jump.
Ok, I’ve got bad news and then crazy awesome news.
The bad news is that I’m not going to be giving away all $400 in prizes over the next few days. Wait, put down the rotten vegetables!
The crazy awesome news is that I’m going to instead be giving away even more in prizes over the next few weeks! I was contacted by a few amazing companies last night that wanted to help sponsor some prizes, so I’m going to be stretching things out in terms of making the contests open to a lot of people. I’ll be holding a contest per week from now until at least March! Throw in the March Madness Contest and it’s hard for me to even fathom how much I’m going to be giving away over the next few weeks!
Of course, I said I’d give away something today and darn if I don’t keep my word! So for today, all you have to do is make a post on your blog about HIF while linking back to us with the anchor text “freebies” and then leave a comment here with a link to your post. Just write something cool about HIF and make sure you include the proper link back. Here’s an quick example:
Hey, It’s Free! is one of the leading sites on the internet for freebies. They filter out all the spammy freebie offers and the guy who runs it, Goob, is pretty legendary to boot! He’s even giving away a $50 giftcard to Walmart this week! So check out HIF and start getting some freebies in your mail!
Or something similar. See how the word “freebies” is linking back to HIF? That’s known as anchor text in nerdy, Internet lingo. You learn something new every day!
It doesn’t matter if your blog is on your own site, Blogger, Myspace, or wherever else you may write on the net. Just make sure you write a little something about HIF and link back to us with the anchor text “freebies.” If you don’t have a blog, then don’t fret! Posting this on a message board you frequent counts as well, as is any other place you can think of. Be creative and chances are I’ll accept your submission. Make sure you don’t forget to leave a comment here with a link to where you made the post so that I can verify it. Then, at the end of the week I’ll pick a winner!
As for what some of the future contests will be, well I will say that one of the upcoming ones rhymes with “scavenger hunt.” Wait a minute, I think I did that wrong… Oh well, if you’re not already a member of the forums, you might want to join up!
The next few weeks are going to be freaking awesome, if I do say so myself!
EDIT: Goob’s Guide To Gambling – for those of you who are having trouble understanding the “spread” concept. Don’t worry, you’re not alone!
So far we’ve had 20 people sign up for the NFL Pickems Contest and 11 people sign up for the College Pickems Contest. There’s still plenty of time to sign up and be competitive in both contest, even if you miss this weekend’s games! So go sign up now!
Here’s a link to the NFL Pickems join page, our Group ID (63704), and our password (freebies).
Here’s a link to the College Pickems, our Group ID (31153), and our password (freebies).
I’ve got good news, awesome news, and crazy awesome news.
For starters, the winner for the free $25 gift certificate has been selected. Hey, I’m a man of my word, I’m just not too punctual. Anyway, Random.org gave me comment #12, which was Bellesouth. So congrats to her and thanks again to everybody who chimed in with a thought or suggestion as well as Free Samples Direct for sponsoring this giveaway!
Next, I don’t like to brag, but I’m immensely thrilled to announce that HIF has been accepted into 9rules, a highly respected directory of cool and awesome sites. This won’t change anything here on the site, but I wanted to thank all of the loyal Hiffers who constantly read HIF, interact with me on the forums, and take the time to e-mail me with their (both good and bad!) opinions. HIF wouldn’t be what it is without y’all.
And finally, it’s time for not just one contest, but two! I mentioned back during the March Madness Contest that I’d like to do something similar for football and then promptly forgot all about that until today. Opps No worries though, as I’ve set up two leagues (one for NFL and one for NCAA) and we’re ready to go!
We’re holding the contests on Yahoo again, so if you don’t already have a free Yahoo account, you can get one here. After signing in, go to both pages and join our groups on the right side of the page!
Here’s a link to the NFL Pickems join page, our Group ID (63704), and our password (freebies).
Here’s a link to the College Pickems, our Group ID (31153), and our password (freebies).
And for the record, even if you’re reading this a few days or even a week later, you can still join and have a chance at winning! For more info, click below or go here on the forums.
Hey there, I'm Goob and this is Hey, It's Free, otherwise known as HIF. I spend my days looking for 100% legit, non-spammy freebies. Have a look around and pretty soon you'll realize we're the #1 site for free stuff!
