Many web surfers scratch their heads when they see a get a free $500 gift card offer on the web. They ask “How can they afford to give away free gift cards of $25 – $1,500 or more to thousands of people?”
Many of the free gift card offers are presented by compilers/aggregators who have contracts with many companies to provide targeted web traffic to their customers sales pages. As a result of sending traffic to the designated sales or sign up pages the sender receives a commission or a fee for each potential customer or group of customers who land on their clients web pages.
Additionally, the compiler/aggregator generates revenue by selling the contact info – names & email addresses or names & home addresses – to other business for a nice profit.
Think of it this way: when you make a purchase at Amazon.com what comes up at the bottom of the page? A statement indicating others who have purchased what you have purchased also purchased the following _______. A similar process is at work here, the compiler knows that you were brought in on a free $250 Visa card offer- which makes you a targeted prospect for a Visa credit card or another Visa product.
Keep in mind that when you signed up with your email address to enter the offer page you also indicated that you understand and agree to their privacy policy and terms and conditions. Part of the terms and conditions is that the y can sell your info to other parties. This is why it is important not to use your primary personal and work accounts for these types of offers as you may begin receiving 10s or 100s of sales offer emails per week.
Anyway, having gotten the basic info out of the way on to the offer completion process itself. As you’ll notice when reviewing free gift card offers most of them include a participation required or upon program completion statement. This simply means that you will be required to complete or opt in to anywhere from 3 to 18 or more what are called “Sponsor Offers” in order to receive your $ giftcard.
The greater the $ amount of the card obviously the bigger the amount of offers you will need to complete. The free offer people are in business to make money, they have just figured out how to do it without having you actually spend money with them. The initial participation process should take anywhere from 10 minutes to more than an hour for larger $ amounts.
If time is a concern to you think about it this way: if you break the dollar amount into the number of hours you spent to complete the program requirements it comes out to a lot more than you’re making per hour at your regular job.
What are participation requirements? Participation requirements usually are other programs which the aggregator wants you to sign up for, they will present you with a choice of offers which they ask you to sign up for and complete their individual participation requirements. Yes, you will get your $100, $250, $500 or $1,500 gift card only if you successfully complete all of the participation requirements. So pay attention to the participation requirements, dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and do not cancel before the participation requirements allow you to.
Some of the programs you sign up for may require that you whip out your credit card and lay down some cold hard cash (for S & H, one month’s membership, free trial, etc.). Viewing it from the 10,000 foot level – so what? The gift card amount you receive will more than cover this cold hard cash and your time.
IMPORTANT! Make sure you read and follow all the program requirements completely, don’t shortcut anything. If you do not complete all program requirements – no gift card! As the old saying states “You gotta pay to play!”