Freebies and free stuff

With the NFL and NCAA football seasons starting just around the corner, it’s time to get ready for the Fall 2009 Contests. Like last year, we’re holding a pick’em contest for both leagues over on Yahoo. To play, use the links below and click the “Join Group” button. From there, enter the following info:¹

Pro Football Pick’em
Group ID#: 33386 This group is now full
Group ID#: 33727 This group is now full
Group ID#: 34409 This group is now full
Group ID#: 35625 This group is now full
Group ID#: 37032 This group is now full
Group ID#: 39259
Password: freebies

College Football Pick’em
Group ID#: 15744 This group is now full
Group ID#: 16111 This group is now full
Group ID#: 17022 This group is now full
Group ID#: 18065
Password: freebies

Both leagues will be using the spread and will drop your lowest week’s score. So if you forget to make your picks once or happen to have an especially bad week, you can still possibly win! If you’re still not sure how to play, check out Goob’s Guide to Gambling that I wrote last year.

Oh yeah, prizes! The following applies for both the college and pro leagues, so if you play in both, you double your chances of winning!

1st place: $50 giftcard to your store of choice.
2nd place: $25 giftcard to your store of choice.
Random winner² : $25 giftcard to your store of choice.

And if you feel so inclined, come talk some smack with us on the forums!³

1. There’s a 50 person limit to each group, so I’ll just keep making more groups as they fill up. Clearly, you should only join one group per league! Cheaters will be deleted! [↩]
2. Must participate in all weeks in order to be eligible for the random winner prize [↩]
3. Is anybody even reading this fine print? [↩]

Before we get to the good stuff, I want to ask a quick question: does the site look okay in your browser? I spent all day ignoring a million other pressing needs in my life in an effort to tweak the site and make it a little faster. I cleaned up a ton of old code and the site should look just like it did yesterday, but before I go any further with it, I want to make sure I didn’t unknowingly break something.

And with that, thanks goes out to everybody who participated in the Teenormous t-shirts July HIF contest. I had fun going through the comments and reading everybody’s favorite freebie. The winning comment number belonged to Sandy, whose husband will soon be rocking out a wicked Metallica t-shirt.

Thanks again for participating and the next contest shall start shortly!

The good folks over at Teenormous t-shirts have offered to give any t-shirt found on their site worth up to $25 to a lucky reader here on HIF. In order to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post and tell me about your favorite freebie you’ve gotten thanks to HIF. Was it an in-store offer? One you signed up for? A coupon? It doesn’t matter, just let me know which it was and how much you enjoyed it! Entries close at 12:01am on August 1st and the winner will be announced that morning.

In case you’ve never been to their site, Teenormous is essentially a search engine for t-shirts and with over 70,000 t-shirts in their database, it’s pretty safe to assume anybody would be able to find a t-shirt they liked there!

Also, I’ve put together a HIF Contest Winners page and linked to it down on the sidebar.

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.

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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:

• First round: 1 point
• Second round: 2 points
• Third round: 4 points
• Fourth round: 6 points
• Semifinals: 10 points
• Finals: 15 points

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!

• First Place: $50
• Second Place: $25
• Random Winner: $25

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:

1. Sign up for our daily newsletter.
2. Click the link in the confirmation e-mail you get shortly after signing up.
3. Come back here and leave a comment on this post.
4. Cross your fingers and hope you win!
5. Name your next child/pet Goob?

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:

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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.

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