Today’s Byte is just for fun. I’m back in the US and my birthday is coming up – so I’ve been happily getting emails from my favorite restaurants inviting me to come in for a free drink or desert.
It got me thinking about the great ways to use the Internet for free food:
Sign up with your favorite restaurants. Certainly every chain and most independents have email lists these days and most send the occasional coupon or freebie.
Open Table (http://www.opentable.com/) make enough reservations to earn a gift certificate. Also I love Open Table for finding restaurants when I’m away from home.
Dinner Broker (http://www.dinnerbroker.com/) I haven’t used it, but it sounds like Open Table.
MyKidsEatFree (http://www.mykidseatfree.com/) a searchable database of bargain nights for kids.
Restaurant.com (http://www.restaurant.com/) where you can buy $25 gift certificates for $10.
Minnesota Restaurants
(http://www.minnesota-restaurants.com/Minnesota-Restaurants-Special-Offers.php) has a list of local coupons. (Sorry for those outside MN.)
I learned about today’s Byte topic through the James J Hill library (http://www.jjhill.org/).
Press Release Grader: http://www.pressreleasegrader.com
You paste your press release into their web site along company name and URL and they grade your release and make suggestions for improvement.
They do a good job of reminding you of some obvious, but easily forgotten tricks for making sure that your press release will do well with search engines. It doesn’t check for grammar, spelling or quality of writing – but again helps to make sure you have the info you need – such as contacts.
Microsoft is offering cash back for shoppers using their Live Search to find products: http://search.live.com/cashback/howToUse
So you sign up for the service. Then you use their search to find products and you collect credit that you can turn into money. The credit range seems to vary from 2-30 percent, depending on the product and vendors I imagine. You can’t get the credit for 60 days, which makes sense and covers them from people buying and returning stuff.
I don’t buy a lot online so I don’t know if I’m going to get much of a chance to test it out. I know that Microsoft’s search engine has not achieved the market share it wanted and having purchased ads on it, I can tell you it didn’t have great appeal to advertisers. So something had to happen.
Maybe this will take off, maybe not – but there you go if you buy a lot online, here’s a chance to make/save some money.
