Showing posts with label Online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online. Show all posts

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Where to Get Free Samples Online

Advertisers spend vast amounts of money marketing new products. The internet is a great way to get product awareness, and advertisers are using the World Wide Web to their advantage by making it easy for the average person to get a sample of their new product. If you spend time looking on the internet you'll be surprised at how many great offers there are to be had.

Normally, when I tell people about these offers, the biggest response I get is 'It's too much hassle to find them and most of them are scams, aren't they? I too was once guilty of this, it was only due to spending so much time on browsing the internet that I managed to stumble across many useful free sample sites.

Finding legitimate sites that give out useful information can be a pain, there are many dodgy web sites that lead you in to a false sense of security before they surprise you with the bill.

One of my most used sites is moneysavingexpert.com. This is a site produced by Martin Lewis; you may have seen him on the TV or heard him on the radio. Not only does he give advice on money matters, he also documents loads of money saving offers like 2 for 1 deals, cash back deals and free samples.

Once you've found a great site like this get signed up for email alerts, so you don't miss out on the best free samples. It's a good idea to set up a new email account for this sort of stuff just in case you get on rouge mailing lists.

It's not just the free samples and vouchers that are available free of charge, if you are looking for something a bit more substantial, get yourself signed up to a site like bzzagent.co.uk. This is a site that rewards for opinions and once you've become a valued contributor on the site, they will send you products to test and keep. It only took me 2 months before I was sent a free coffee maker to try out and let them know what I thought of it.

If you are looking for free samples that don't require work, such as filling out a questionnaire or writing a review then there are literally 1000's to be had. I could write a whole book listing the many sites that give away free stuff. So to make it easy for yourself look out for the online free sample directories or just Google 'free sample directory' and you'll find loads of great sites which will keep you up to date with all the latest free samples.

The main thing to remember about getting free samples on the internet is that free should mean free, if you are asked to make a payment then forget it, it's obviously not free. If you're new to this sort of thing the best place to start is in forums such as the one on the pre mentioned moneysavingexpert.com, here you can get advice from people who have experienced getting free stuff and learn from their experiences.

How a Product Launch Manager Can Help You Take Your Business to the Next Level   Three Tips on How to Market a New Product   Review of Auto Click Profits   Product Launch Tactics - Using Autoresponders to Boost Your Product Launches   The Best Ways to Launch a Product Online   Launching A New Product? 5 Necessary Questions to Ask   

Discuz PayPal Plugin - Case Study of Selling Online

A few years ago I was running a Chinese forum using the most popular forum system in China, Discuz. Discuz has a very useful user point system where points can be assigned to forum users depending on how much they participate. Depending on how many points a user has, he is granted different levels of permissions to do different things such as viewing file attachments, broadcasting global "shout outs", etc. Discuz also included a feature where users can purchase these points through Alipay (China's most popular online payment system). However only people living in China can use Alipay, so since all my bank accounts are Canadian, I had no way to monetize my forum through this point purchasing system.

I searched around in the Discuz official forum for a PayPal module which I could use outside of China, but had no luck. However I did notice many other people in the same situation searching for the same thing. So I thought maybe I could write this module and sell it, which I did, and made about a thousand dollars off it. The module was basically a free download, however I added some basic authentication mechanism to it so that the user can only use it for 10 times before the module locks up. It will become usable again only if the user purchase a password from me that is generated from the user's domain name, so one purchase is only usable for one domain. This authentication piece was encoded with Ioncube so that a typical user cannot easily neutralize it.

Unfortunately the Discuz platform upgrades so frequently that my plugin soon required update. I originally wrote the plugin for Discuz 6.0, but soon Discuz 6.1 was released. I updated the plugin for 6.1, then 7.0 was released. I updated the plugin for 7.0, but more new versions were released, and now it is Discuz X1! Finally I realized it is a bad business model anyways that my product is based on another company's product, so I decided to cease development. My time is worth more than what I can make with the plugin if spent elsewhere.

Moral of the story? Don't based your product on product of someone else, if their product becomes obsolete so will yours. However the upside is I am now pretty good at programming for PayPal integration.

How a Product Launch Manager Can Help You Take Your Business to the Next Level   Three Tips on How to Market a New Product   Review of Auto Click Profits   Product Launch Tactics - Using Autoresponders to Boost Your Product Launches   

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