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?

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!

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

For the first time in years, I spent more time on the opening of March Madness doing something else other than watching the games: haggling with Yahoo’s tech support (what an oxymoronic term), which is about as helpful as a drunken monkey. Basically, what I noticed this afternoon was that the system had glitched and our first group in the contest had its scoring system changed. The second group was right as rain though. As you can imagine, this makes it hard to try and treat both groups as one if they’re not using the same scoring system!

The first group is now using a Seed Difference bonus for upsets instead of the flat 1 point bonus that I selected. What that means is that if you, say, correctly picked a 10 seed to beat a 7 seed, then you’d get the difference in seeds (3) as a bonus. This is not the scoring I wanted. This is not the scoring I selected. And yet Yahoo was kind enough to override my choice for us. Gee golly, isn’t technology fun! (…where’s my flask)

So what am I going to do? Give away more prizes! I’ll now treat each group separately and give away two first place prizes of $50 and two second place prizes of $25. It’s more than I’d planned to give out, but it’s really the only fair way to solve the problem. Plus, I enjoy being fair and upfront with y’all. The only alternative is to manually score all 460+ brackets of the first group and that’s…oh man. No thanks.

And as a side note, because I’m feeling ranty, let me give some unsolicited advice to Yahoo that’s surely to go ignored, if not unnoticed. Look, this is the second year in a row that we’ve had a problem with the HIF March Madness Contest. Last year was all me though and you know what I did? Admitted that I’d screwed up and found a solution for the problem. I’d be awesome if you could do the same. I know the “tech support” people I “talked” to with intervals of 2 hours between each e-mail correspondence are doing their best, but repeatedly having them copy and paste the same canned response that “there’s nothing we can do” is complete bull. One click of a button and the scoring system is changed back to what I had it set at. And while we’re on the topic of tech support, do you know what they developed almost a decade ago? Live chat tech support. It’s highly efficient and provides for a high customer satisfaction rate. You should totally look into it.

Ok,

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!

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!

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 Budget Busters is going to be a new series where I explain ways to save money while spending money: coupon, lowering your utility bills, trading items instead of buying them new, stuff like that. This first one covered the new Entertainment 2009 Coupon Book that basically has the following pros & cons:

Pros

• Comes with $20,000+ in coupons.
• You can look at the coupons in your area’s book before you get it! This is a huge bonus and that I think some people overlook. You essentially know exactly what you’re getting upfront.
• Many of the coupons can only be found in this booklet and are worth more than most circular coupons. (free entree instead of only an appetizer, etc)
• Each book is area specific (mine is for the D.C. region only), so around half of the coupons are for locally owned and small stores.
• Coupons expire on Nov 1, 2009 at the earliest, so you have almost a year to use them.

Cons

• Costs between $16-20, but comes with free shipping.
• Some of the coupons for on-line retailers can be found by Googling.
• Most restaurant coupons are BOGO, so it’s not that great for a single person.

I gave an example in the video of how I ate at my favorite Mexican hole in the wall recently for my birthday and used a BOGO coupon for a free $10 entree. That’s already half of the cost it took to purchase the coupon booklet and after I use the second BOGO coupon in a few months, I’ll have recouped the price of purchase. After that, every time I use one of the other hundreds of coupons, it’s like free money.

So at the very least, check out your region’s Entertainment 2009 Coupon Book and see if the coupons in your area interest you! If so, order a book while it’s still on sale for 30% off WITH free shipping!

I also announced the winner of the $50 Target gift card, which was Deem2. Thank you to everyone who participated and if you’re now following me on Twitter, send me a message and I’ll gladly reply!

There’s also one last hidden clue in the video about something else coming up, but I can’t say anything more about that

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.

• If you’re not a member of the forums, please register here.
• Not a member of Twitter? No problem, just register here. This will enable you to participate in an upcoming contest. Once you’re registered, why not follow my personal account and HIF’s account as your friends? *hint hint*
• If you suddenly stopped receiving the daily newsletter around last week, do the following: 1) Check your spam folder. If it’s there, mark as “not spam” and you should be good. If not… 2) Contact me and we’ll go from there. For the record, I’m curious as to how widespread the problem is and I didn’t cause it to happen!
• The first comment number I drew was 30, which was me. Highly amused and not wanting to win my own contest, I redrew numbers….
• …and got 92, which was Camille! Massive congrats to her and thanks to everybody for participating!

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!

Boring Fine Print:

• Contestants must be 18 years or older and live in the US.
• Whenever multiple correct answers have been submitted, I’ll use random.org to pick the winner.
• Contestants must use a valid e-mail address when leaving comments. Otherwise, how am I going to contact you if you win?
• Contest ends this Saturday at midnight. The winner will be notified and announced on February 1st.

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).

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.

Rules are quite simple. Each week you pick what team you think will win. Knowledge of football is not required, as even a monkey can pick “Team A or Team B?” At the end of the season, whoever picked the most correct games wins.

We are using the “spread” feature. Basically, before every game, gamblers in Vegas determine which team is favored to win and by how much. The “how much” is a spread. For instance, in tonight’s game between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, the Giants are considered the better team by 4 points. So if I pick the Giants to win, they have to win by 5 or more points for it to count as a victory for me. Thus, if I pick the Giants and they win 22-20, I’ll lose even though they won in real life. Yahoo clearly shows what the spread is and even which team most people are picking, so it’s really easy.

As for prizes, there will be the usual 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and random prize winner. In order to qualify for prizes, you must make picks in at least 15 of the 17 weeks. The NFL league will drop each player’s lowest week total and the NCAA will drop each player’s two lowest week totals (since we all missed the very first week!).

Each winner will receive a yet undetermined cash prize, but I promise it’ll be good

There were quite a few entries, but nobody got all 50 items. So, I gave each entry a color: green if it was clearly correct, yellow if it was kind of iffy, and red if it was not even close. Green got 2 points, yellow 1 point, and red nothing. The highest score was a 92 and the lowest was a 2, haha.

The Top 5 on the scoreboard ended up being:

1st: Pbchicknz – 92 points
2nd: Dawtch – 91 points
3rd: (tie) Shaynon – 89 points
(tie) Bekah – 89 points
5th: Van Meters – 88 points

It was pretty close up there! If you want to know your score, PM me on the forums or leave a comment.

For the random prize, I used Random.org to pick between 1 and 50 and it selected #28, which was the fire engine. Only 11 people found one and I lined them all up based on when they submitted their entries, Random.org picked #4, and that ended up being Van Meters.

A few interesting facts about the hunt include: Only one person found somebody with a musical instrument, making it by far the hardest item to find. The easiest was a green stoplight, as only two people were unable to find one of those. One person managed to find a snapshot of an airplane in the sky (!) and my favorite items out of place included a million bags on a NY sidewalk and a laundry machine in the middle of a road.

So, Pbchicknz won $50! Dawtch won $25! Van Meters won $25! Everybody had fun – wooo!

Oh, for the record, this will also be the first contest that I’ll tie into the new awards system on the forums. Everybody who participated will get a ribbon soon!

So screw this, forget registering and messing with Wordpress. I’m sorry for ever making people do that in the first place.

I’ve uploaded a text document with all the items on it that you can download by right clicking and hitting “save as.” Then copy all the links you find into that text file and send it to me as an attachment by June 3rd. My e-mail is heyitsfree(AT)gmail(DOT)com without the parenthesis.

Remember, even if you don’t find everything, you can still win a cash prize, so submit whatever links you DO find!

Also, if you already saved some links into wordpress, you can either copy them over into the text document or not. I’ll check and make sure all your links are counted as an “I’m sorry for not knowing how to properly operate a halfway decent contest.”

In the future, I’m not going to bother with registrations and complex plugins and websites. From now on, it’s the path of least resistance and most basic.

Also, 100 trillion thanks go out to PB and Froggie on the forums for helping me discover and troubleshoot the problem. You girls rock.