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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Easy Gift Cards with MyPoints

There are tons of ways to earn gift cards, music downloads, and long distance calling cards online. Although this is not, technically, earning money, if these are things you would buy anyway, it amounts to the same thing.

My favorite method of earning money (gift cards) online is with MyPoints.com. Once you sign up, MyPoints will send you email containing advertising offers. You read the email, click on the "Get Points" button in the email, visit the site that opens (for as little as a few seconds), and your account is credited 5 points.

Five points for each email doesn't sound like much when you need 500 points or more to get a Gift Card. But it really is fast and easy to earn a $10 Gift Card. And the stores you can get Gift Cards for are probably stores that you shop at now.

Wal-Mart, Target, Sharper Image, Pier 1, Old Navy, Linens'n Things, Bath & Body Works, Kmart, JCPenny, Home Depot, Gap, CVS, Blockbuster, and Barns and Noble all offer a $5 or $10 Gift Card for 1500 points or less.

Fifteen hundred points is three hundred clicks on that "Get Points" button, but that isn't hard to do. I have MyPoints send the email to my yahoo mail account (not my primary email account) and I go there when I have free time or I'm just surfing the internet.

I open the email, click on the "Get Points" button, let the site load, then close it. It only takes a couple of minutes to earn that 5 points, and sometimes I earn much more than 5 points.

One day I was comparing prices for printer ink online, and doing the MyPoints clicking at the same time. I opened one of the MyPoints emails and found an advertiser offering a decent discount on the printer ink I had been looking for. I surfed the advertisers site, satisfied myself that they offered a good value and bought my ink from them.

I earned extra points on the purchase, plus the 5 points just for visiting the site, and found the printer ink I was going to buy anyway. How easy was that!

I've also earned 10 points per dollar spent at Overstock where I go to buy sheets, anyway. I bought a set of 400 thread count, King size sheets for $40 at Overstock and earned an extra 400 points. Forty dollars for King Size sheets! You can't find 180 thread count sheets in King size for $40. (shipping at Overstock is $2.95, no matter what you buy.) Now, you can't beat that with a stick.

Anyway, so far I've earned three $10 Gift Cards from MyPoints. I redeemed them all at Wal-Mart, because I shop at Wal-Mart every week, anyway. Earning that $30 was easy, and I actually found some great deals along the way.

Give MyPoints a try. If you surf the internet, read online, or just like to comparison shop on the web, it's not too much trouble to click on some email while you're doing it.