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How To Get Paid To Buy Christmas Gifts

December 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Santa Claus can help you find deals! Or maybe not...You’ve got less than a month until Christmas. Are you ready?

Maybe you’re looking for some Secret Santa gift ideas. Gift cards are a pretty hot item as well. You can spend a lot of time on these “deals for today” type sites (woot.com and the like), but you run the risk of not finding the right present for family members on your list.

In this economy, too, people are looking for Christmas gift deals all over the place. I had forgotten about this one spot I use often and felt like I should share it with you. In fact, I just bought some books for Christmas and got 8% cash back on it.

Online sales have gone up this year, and were even almost 30% higher than Black Friday. People are looking for deals online, and I’ve got just the place for you.

(If you’re already sold on it and don’t want to read more, just head on over with this link and sign up!)

Get paid for the shopping you were going to do anyway

It’s called Ebates, and quite simply you get cash back for making purchases you’d make anyway.

It almost sounds like a scam, but it’s not. If you use the website I’ll tell you about as your starting point, you can find great deals at over 1000 stores you already shop at. Then you click the link with a savings code and you’re sent to the site you would have gone to anyway.

You can same money on books for Christmas!For example, let’s take the books I picked up. I go to ebates.com and look for my Barnes and Noble store. When I click on the name, I get redirected to www.bn.com. That’s where I would have gone anyway to buy these books, only know they know I came from ebates (because of a cookie on your computer, nothing troublesome – every site in the world uses them). Whatever I buy from Barnes and Noble, I get 8% cash back.

It’s really a simple explanation

Here’s how I think this works. A lot of online retailers give people affiliate commissions for sales. Amazon, for example, gives me a small commission when you buy something via a link from my site. It’s the same exact thing.

The guys who started ebates had a great idea. They decided to partner up with online retailers to get affiliate commissions when people go to their sites via ebates. The folks at ebates give some of that affiliate commission to you, the consumer, as a way to keep you using the site. You get money, ebates gets money, and the retailers get the sales. It’s just mutually beneficial marketing.

You can save a lot of money by getting it back AND get some free stuff in the process

To save extra money, I also had a coupon for Barnes and Noble. So I bought my stuff and got the 8% cash back, but I also was still able to use the 20%-off coupon I had gotten in the mail. Sure, using the coupon makes me get less money, but all of the discounts together work really well together.

Plus when you sign up for ebates, you get free stuff right away. If you sign up for ebates, you’ll get a free $10 gift card as a bonus. You can get one for Barnes & Noble, Target, Home Depot, and more. Just for signing up for your free account.
Free gift cards for using ebates

I don’t want to sound more spammy than I already do, but I need to mention again that ebates is FREE.

Why I’m encouraging you to sign up

I try not to support stuff on my blog that I don’t think is worthwhile, and I’m definitely not in it for the money.

There are two reasons I’m encouraging you:

  1. There’s no real reason not to use ebates. It’s exactly what it says it is: you get money for buying stuff you’d buy anyway. It works, and you save money (in the sense that they give it back). I’m all about saving money. If you’re using a cash back credit card, you’d get even more back (but most of the stores on ebates give you way more cash back than your credit card would if you just went to the actual store)
  2. I do actually get credit if you sign up using my link and end up buying $25 worth of stuff eventually. I don’t get money every time you buy, so it’s not one of those pyramid schemes. I’d just get a small ($5 I think) commission if you sign up to use ebates and make a purchase.

I want to be clear, though, that I like it so much I wouldn’t even be offended if you didn’t use my link to sign up. Obviously I’d love it if you used my referrer link, but if you don’t want me to get credit, just go to www.ebates.com and sign up.

So there you have it! You can finish your shopping from the comforts of your own couch and get some money back for your trouble!

Have a Merry Christmas, everyone! :)

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What’s The Difference Between Grooveshark and Spotify?

July 29, 2011 By 4 Comments

I love music. I love all kinds of music. I love free music.

When some coworkers of mine introduced me to Grooveshark, I couldn’t believe it was real. All that music at my fingertips, and for free!

I literally boasted to my friends and family. “Come on, give me any song. ANY song, and I’ll play it for you right now.” And I did. I was proud.

Now there’s all this chitter about Spotify. To be honest, I didn’t really know what it was the first time I heard about it. But, because I love music and I enjoy internet, I wanted to give it a try.

My first question was how Spotify differs from Grooveshark. They essentially seemed like the same thing when I heard about it.

First impressions

Out of the box, the main difference is that while Grooveshark is a website, Spotify is an app you download.

My first search was the word “guarani” because I wanted to see if they’d have the really random Paraguayan music I want to listen to and can’t buy here. They DO!

To be fair, I searched “guarani” in Grooveshark as well. A lot of the same songs came up, but Spotify has about twice the music Grooveshark does.

Another fantastic feature is that Spotify also picked up all my iTunes music as well. So now I have one place where I can listen to the music I have on my computer and any song I could possibly want to listen to – without having to buy it.

Music management is different

The first real stand-out feature for me is that Spotify can become my music management tool. It picks up the music you have on your hard drive and shows it to you much like iTunes does. However, where it really stands out, is that you can even use it to synch your iPod.

Additionally – and this astounds me – Spotify can synch your iPhone or Android phone as long as your computer and phone are running the app and you’re connected to the same network. I haven’t tried this yet, but I will when I get home. This alone might be the deal-maker for me.

Different levels for different needs

Spotify is free if you want it to be, or you can pay and get some other things. I’m just fine and dandy ignoring ads and the 15 seconds (not TOO frequent) ads and not paying per month. I can see them becoming annoying after a while, so it will be a matter of Spotify as a whole being worth the monthly fee.

For example, in order to use it on your phone, you’ll have to get the premium subscription, which will run you $10 a month. Also with premium, you can use what they call “offline mode” and have your favorite playlists – made up of music you don’t own, remember – available when you’re offline. It’s almost like borrowing the music indefinitely without buying the mp3s.

Update: It’s not all free forever, though. According to this post outlining some changes to Spotify from their blog, after 6 months of use we’ll be limited to 10 hours a month. If I understand correctly, we will also only be allowed to play the same song 5 times. Buying the $5/month subscription will eliminate those limitations, however.

Making it social

In this age, people love sharing stuff. When I find sweet music, I love sharing it.

In my first hour of playing with Spotify, I’ll tell you it’s easier to find users in Grooveshark. There’s allegedly a “social” button in my profile, but I can’t find it.

If you have Spotify and would like to add me (or anyone), put this in your Spotify search bar: spotify:user:hisc1ay

Overall, I’m really impressed

I will probably use Spotify as my “get any song from anywhere for free” from here on out (at least for the next 6 months). I used to use Grooveshark, but they charge for their mobile app now too. Yes, Spotify’s app is more expensive, but the differences are more valuable, potentially.

I won’t go buying a premium subscription yet, but I won’t say I will never buy one. Offline mode and mobile availability are what would eventually swing me that way.

Bottom line: For the price of one CD a month, you can have access to all CDs in their library, which includes labels like Universal, EMI, and Sony.

What’s your favorite thing about Spotify?

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Product Review

December 10, 2004 By Leave a Comment

Now that I’ve had my toy for a couple days, I figured I’d give a review. You can see a picture in the previous post.

My initial reaction was “Wow…sexy! But it’s heavy…” I don’t really know how heavy these types of things are supposed to be. It’s not real heavy, just more than I expected. The design is nice, there are only 10 buttons on the whole thing that perform 5 actions, so it’s pretty intuitive. I like that you can’t do much with it. It’s a music player, and if you want, you can record a voice memo. That’s it. Nothing else to worry about. Very chic.

The first thing to do is load music. I’m a little disappointed that you need external software to add stuff. In my ideal world, it would work just like a normal USB drive…plug it in and it’s good to go. But everything has a driver, so it’s not that big a deal. The player comes with MusicMatch Jukebox to help you manage the songs, but you don’t need to install it. It also comes with Dell DJ Explorer, which is kind of like a plugin to Windows Explorer. Installing this driver allows you to treat the DJ like another hard drive in that you can drag and drop music. So that’s handy and doesn’t have overhead (like MM does). If you have your music separated into genres on your computer and want to keep them separated as such, I would recommend starting with your largest genre and making a playlist for it. Then do the rest. You’ll see what I mean if you keep reading.

Playing the music is as easy as hitting the button. Like I said before, the controls are very simple to use. Forward, back, play/pause, and a scroll barrel get you around the most. I particularly enjoy the barrel. There’s a “back” button, like in a browser, and a “home” button to make menu navigation pretty intuitive and easy to get used to.

I don’t have any, but I know there are a lot of peripherals for this device, and some of them are pretty nifty. You can get an FM transmitter to use in the car, an arm band to strap on when you run, and a few carrying/protective case options. I will be checking them out shortly.

One feature that I would like to see is the ability to use folders. When I copied all my music from my computer to my DJ, I figured it would keep the folder structure and I would be able to play, say, my Christmas folder. But none of my music was in a Christmas folder. I had to go through all nearly 1000 songs and add them to a Christmas playlist (which would have been simple if not for the 500 non-Christmas songs I had already copied over). Folders would be a very nice addition. Once you have music that on your PC is in different playlists, it’s pretty much a hassle to get those back. I will change my mind if there’s a utility to convert your PC playlist to a DJ playlist. That would be a great mod to make.

The only real complaint I have is that Dell took a really long time to get this product ready, and then an even longer time to get it to me. The ship date when I ordered was November 24th. Close to that time I got an email from Dell saying that the shipping was delayed and would ship on or before December 3rd. Around December 2nd I got another email saying that shipping was delayed more, to the 10th, and that due to FTC rules I had to confirm that date with Dell or they would cancel my order. I’ve never heard of that rule, and I think it’s dumb. At any rate, I sent them a nice little email about how this was the second product I ordered from them in a year that they delayed shipping for more than 2 weeks and that I would be reconsidering ordering from Dell again. They sent me an email back apologizing for the inconvenience and said they’d send me the DJ as soon as they could. Two days later, there it was.

It seems like this was one of the last Dell DJ15s sold, because when I ordered it it was no longer on the website (but had been the day before), and the guy I talked to at Dell said it was the last day this product would be offered. A few days later I found out that the Gen2 DJs were coming out very soon. For a first generation mp3 player, this DJ rocks. I’m sure the Gen2s are much better, and I know they’re sexier. At this point, all you can get are a 5GB mini-DJ and a 20GB DJ. I say go for the 20, but wait til Spring to see if the $250 price tag comes down. Still, that price is not bad at all for the product. It sure beats the $400 for an iPod (which I would still love to have, so if your a philanthropist send me an email).

-j

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