Hey, It’s Free! is a blog where myself and two other authors post links to freebies that can be found on the Internet. We have three rules that we adhere by, which are 1) The item has to be 100% free. If you have to do anything beyond give out your name and address, we won’t post it. No trial offers, no credit cards, no referrals, nothing like that. 2) The freebie has to be something that people actually want! So no links to free brochures for traveling to Montana! And 3) We have to attempt to be funny and/or witty while posting the freebie. I’m not saying we always succeed in that though

We also have a growing message board, where fans of HIF get together and post far more freebies than we could ever post on the main site! Again, the freebies have to have 100% free, but we do have a coupon section and whatnot. I also post video reviews of the certain freebies on the blog and whenever I get a chance, I write up huge lists of “special” freebies, for instance like the “Free Stuff On Your Birthday” list I compiled last October. That one has been a huge hit!

The blog is most certainly a hobby for me, as I run it just for fun. As for a living, I do a little bit of everything!

The main reason I ended up starting this blog was because of all the other hundreds of freebie sites out there which didn’t actually post links to free stuff! 99% of freebie sites now-a-days post links to “freebies” where you have to complete trial offers and give out your credit card information in order to get anything for “free.” Meanwhile, I was finding countless freebies that were actually free and which I thought people might enjoy, despite the fact that they were usually only product samples or smaller freebies. And it turned out that I was right, as I’ve gotten hundred of e-mails thanking me for finally starting a site where everything on it is actually free.

The blog has been up and running since August of 2005, but I didn’t shift the site over to it’s current “freebie-only” format until March of 2006.

The main blog gets roughly 700 visitors per day while the forums get another 400 per day.

I currently monetize the site through Google Adsense and paid text links on the sidebar. Google works well on the site as there are plenty of other freebie sites who advertise through them, but it’s always a challenge making sure the ads are best optimized and in the best placements. In the early months of the blog, I also used PPC ads for “free” samples, but I ended up abandoning that method. It actually paid well, but the samples weren’t actually free and I decided I didn’t like “tricking” my readers. I wanted every link on the site to go to genuine freebies.

With all honesty, I can say anybody. Well, I guess anybody who likes free stuff. If you hate getting things for free and instead love paying for them, you probably wouldn’t like my site. From the forums, I can tell that our demographics range from poor college kids looking to save money for extra beer to single stay-at-home moms who are trying to live on a budget.

I post a few times per day on the site, so I’d say I spend 30-60 minutes each day looking for new freebies to post and then posting them. I also spend about another 30-60 minutes a day making sure everything on the site is running correctly, monitoring the forums, etc.

Well, like I said earlier, it’s pretty hard to find a person who wouldn’t be interested in my blog as most people do in fact like freebies! Even more so than just getting something for free, people hate getting only bills and junk mail in their mailbox. You’d be amazed how exciting just going to check your mail can become whenever you start signing up for freebies, because every trip to the mailbox is a mini-adventure. You have no idea what might be in it!

Never take a break! By which I mean, every day you should be trying to post new material, find new link trades, and get more traffic. After a few months, you’ll start to get burned out and wonder why the heck more people aren’t reading what you think is the best site on the net! But you just have to stick with it and suddenly you’ll get a link from a huge site and then another and before you know it, posting of your blog will be fun again.

Also, try not to slap a bunch of ads on your site as soon as you open it. You need to step back and look at it from a reader’s perspective. Is your blog something you’d want to read? Is it interesting? Is it even different from any of the other blogs out there who write about the same material you are? If not, you should go back to the drawing board and think of a way to make it unique!

This blog can be visited at http://www.heyitsfree.net