Let
someone offer you something free.
Your natural reaction: what's the catch?
You know in your heart of hearts that somewhere along the line
it's going to cost you.
Why
do companies give things away free?
After all, they're in business to make a profit. They
know it and you know it. They
also know that a giveaway worth $100 can, if handled properly, bring
in $1000 in revenue.
Companies
have been giving away "promotional items" for years.
These items attract customers who spend much more with the
companies than the cost of the promotional items.
The
supermarket chains in the West have regular weekly sales.
They discount a small percentage of the items on their shelves
to bring in customers. The
customers are happy to get the discounts; and while they're at it,
they spend a lot more doing the rest of their weekly shopping at the
market.
It
didn't take long for the e-commerce moguls on the Internet to connect
their strategies to the tried and true lures of ordinary commerce.
In order to attract customers, they throw out the bait that's
become commonly known as "freebies."
The
World Wide Web is chock-a-block these days with freebies. Some of them
are real money savers for Internet users too.
I
can remember agonizing over the $500 - $600 it cost to buy the Encyclopedia
Britannica. Then, for
awhile it was free on the World Wide Web!
Now you can subscribe to it for $59.95 a year or $9.95 a month.
This
is one of the problems with freebies.
They start out that way, get you hooked and then start
charging.
When
I first wrote this article, I said, "Want to see how many
different kinds of things are free on the Web"?
EasyFreebies has a huge list of 83 freebie categories! Each
category has a list of links to other sites.
The site has gone and so have the freebies.
Freebie
sites seem to disappear fairly quickly.
One site I checked out had free bingo.
You could win cash prizes up to $20 if you won a bingo
game. I didn't win anything, but I had fun playing, and I didn't
have to pay for the bingo card! It
looks like they ran out of players or prize money.
Catalog
Mart has 101 free
catalogs, with links to other sites. Many of the free catalogs
on the Web are available only in the USA or Canada, but there are also
companies that supply them internationally.
At least they’re still in business after a couple of years.
One
site, "Catalog
Link Around the World" lists the free catalogs
available anywhere on the planet where there's a postal service.
However, be wary. When
I clicked on the Spiegel catalog icon, it offered the catalog for
$5.00 and said it was only available in the United States.
That’s not what I’d call a free catalog!
Do
you ladies spend a lot buying recipe books?
There are dozens of free recipe sites on the Web. Just
type "recipes" into your favorite search engine, and drive
your palate mad!
Gamers
can find more free games on the Web than they'll ever be able to play.
In addition to the ones that you can download, there are online
games where you can compete with others, live, around the world.
One of the best sites for online games is Yahoo
Games. They have
thousands of people playing at any one time.
Sites
like Free Games have card
games, board games, arcade, action, simulation and adventure
games. They also list the top 50 game sites.
They also have a silly ad skateboarding across the screen and
making it difficult to focus on the game categories.
One
of the most incredible free things on the Web is the news.
If you like reading different papers and magazines with
different points of view and political persuasions, you no longer have
to subscribe to a half dozen or more newspapers and magazines.
Large
numbers of periodicals can be accessed free on the Internet.
Just go to either Online
Newspapers or the Internet
Public Library for news. The
E-Library has
magazines available by category or by country; and the Magazines
Online Index has links to over 1300 periodicals.
If
contests and sweepstakes are your thing, there are loads of sites for
those who feel lucky. One such, It’s
Cool Contests and Sweepstakes
has loads of them. Many sweepstakes and contest sites
want to develop their mailing lists.
In exchange for your email or mailing address, you get entered
in their drawings.
For
travelers, there's nothing like the free email sites that make it
possible to keep in touch with friends, relatives and loved
ones. Hotmail and
Yahoo
Mail are the most popular free email sites. Many others are
listed at the Free
Site.
Outside
of email, chatting is the single most popular service on the
Internet. A number of free chat programs are now available on
the Web. Those who'd like to chat
will find a huge directory of sites in the A+
Chat Directory.
People
spend thousands of dollars on greeting cards annually.
Now, there are livelier cards available electronically.
E-cards can be sent and received within minutes, FREE!
Try Free
Digital Postcards for a listing of free digital card sites.
For
computer related freebies, go to The
Free Site. They
have much more than computer-related freebies.
They keep the site updated and also have a newsletter you can
subscribe to free.
Free
beauty and health products, coupons, recipes, books, posters and
stickers, food and drink, videos and CD's, clothing, catalogs and
magazines can be found at First
Rate Freebies.
Incidentally,
if you sign up for a lot of freebies, you may be targeted by spammers
(junk mail senders). Be sure to protect yourself against spam.
There's a nice, free anti-spam program called Spammer
Slammer that you may want to check out.
Look
at it this way: if someone offers you something free, take it.
If you like the other things they offer at a price, buy
them. If you don't, you needn't worry about how you benefited
from the company's advertising dollars.
I like freebies. At least they're free after I pay my Internet bill!
