I was thinking today as there were some people who were saying that they needed to buy advertising credit from various online companies and would have to spend almost $100. It’s not unusual too where these companies usually partner up with others where they give vouchers to solicit other people’s customers to do business with them as they feel that is the right demographic. An example was I registered a $2 domain only to then afterwards be presented with so many advertising coupons for different companies like Microsoft.

Now obviously some have stipulations such as for new accounts only. Therefore you can’t exactly just go hunting around for vouchers this way to save money in every case. But it’s definitely not a bad idea at times especially if you were looking to try a service for the first time. Offline the most common type of deals in this manner are buy a product and get a free trial offer on various services as an example. And yes, many times the actual product can be cheaper than subscribing to whatever it is you were interested in directly. You just have to do the research.

This is one of those things that kind of make you think in a funny way. Basically, there was a conversation about strange marketing tactics that have been used in the past. One example specifically was a company that had a contest offer of sort where the first few people who named their newborn baby after its new upcoming product would receive a large amount of cash as prize. I guess from the business point of view it’s basically like human advertising and so the value could be infinite.

The funny thing I thought was the different way of thinking in terms of the offer from a bystanders point of view. Not surprisingly, most people were saying how that is dumb as there is no way they would name their child after a corporate product as that is something they would have to live with. Then the other perspective came in where people were saying why wouldn’t you do it since the money being offered is so much? In this case too, there was no stipulation that they had to actually keep the name so you could easily just change it after you get the the money.

Not surprisingly most of the people that mentioned the second train of thought consisted more of an entrepreneurial crowd. It is kind of neat though I think how different ways of thinking can completely change a perspective opportunity where while some may just throw something away because they only see it in one direction you never know as someone else’s perspective just might make a lot of sense. You could say both sides were definitely thinking of the long term except I would say one side was more focused in terms of insisting it is a dumb idea whereas the other side was more open minded in seeing if it could potentially work without impact where it would be mostly a gain.

I must admit though, I wonder what the company was thinking when they came up with that promotion idea.

Today my friend was telling me that all this time she had the ability to enroll into a special workplace plan for her cell phone that would enable her to save about thirty to fifty percent off her bill. We were just thinking how much money she would have saved if she researched it ahead of time.

Usually workplaces do have offer a ton of deals as businesses can get a lot of customers that way. It often requires you to simply browse through all the company literatures. It’s almost like bargain hunting in general. I remember I used to do that when I worked for companies as I often found all the deals more interesting than say watching TV on a break.

I was reading about a deal that a bank was offering where you could potentially get a free $250 for simply signing up for an account and doing some services such as a direct deposit or auto bill payment feature. I was so tempted to do this as I was thinking at worst I could just close the account once I get the credit if I didn’t like it.

I was just thinking about the hassle though of having so many bank accounts as like a credit card I find it a lot easier to minimize it and not enroll for every card out there just because you get some kind of reward.

I got this offer to download some free music from this site where there is a large variety of albums to select from. Essentially, I was given about $5 and each song costs about fifty cent to download. This was one of those situation where I am inclined to use everything up otherwise it seems kind of wasteful.

Usually in these cases though, I often end up wasting some credit as it seems like most companies set it up in a way where it feels like you just need to pay a little extra when you have little left. So for many, they whip out the credit card thinking they are still getting a deal. In my mind though, that is money spent that you wouldn’t have spent normally. So in that sense it just makes more sense to sacrifice the remaining credit if you can’t buy anything else on its own.

Very rarely are you getting a good deal from using cash to balance out the remaining credits or reward points to buy an item from what I have seen. Unless it is the reverse where you were going to buy something with money anyways and then the credits are going to be placed in as an after thought bonus. That would be different.