A Place to Buy Prizes
By day I’m a marketing manager. It’s a fun gig not because I have authority, but because I get to work with really competent, good people that make me the job pretty easy. One thing that I like to make sure and do is show them appreciation any time I can. One of the ways to express my thanks is with random prizes.
The best place to get random stuff on the Internet is a great little site called The Something Store. The concept is really simple: you give them $10, they send you something. Thats it. Easy squeezy. It makes giving the prize really fun because you never know what someones going to get.
We’ve been burned a few times with the something store, but we’ve also got some pretty cool things. For example, the best laughs we’ve had as a department were for the triple XL men’s pajamas that my graphics designer, a woman, won for marketer of the month. Histerical.
A buddy of mine, Andrew Nagy, wrote a great piece about The Something Store’s marketing perspective, and I agree.
Another great place to get cool stuff to giveaway as prizes is the ever awesome ThinkGeek.com. ThinkGeek is great because they stock only the neatest gizmos and their product descriptions are pretty awesome.
For those of you who like a unique shopping experience, check out Vat19 (disclaimer alert: I used to work for Vat19). They do really cool product videos for everything they stock. in addition to retailing crazy products, they also produce DVDs. Czech them out: www.Vat19.com.
One last disclaimer, I was not paid for any of the links in this post. In fact, I wag my finger to shame whoever writes splogs. No harm in getting paid to write, but knock it off with the BS links.
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July 27th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
It’s interesting that you would wag your finger at splogs, given that the company you work for spends a small fortune on black hat paid links from one of the biggest splog-supporters, PayU2Blog. I looked into paid links a while back and decided against it after seeing overpriced paid links from companies like 4AllMemory on a bunch of crappy Google-penalized sites.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Barry,
Thanks for the comment. I’m curious as to how you know I work for 4allmemory.com? Also, please remember that there are multiple decision makers at any organization, so please be mindful of that when you make assumptions about my marketing ethics.
July 29th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Barry = Epic FAIL
How cowardly of you to anonymously confront Justin based on a business decision that is in no way related to the theme of the article at hand.
You may keep your anonymity Sir, but your integrity has clearly left the building.
August 1st, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Tanner,
Thank you for your comment too.
One thing that this post reminds us of is that the Web is the ultimate vehicle for free conversation. I have never given authorization or signed a contract to buy, sell, or otherwise promote spam.
I love to blog. Absolutely love it. In fact, I’d like to start another blog and get paid for it. I was thinking of joining socialspark.com since they have a very clear code of ethics policy and all links through their service must be no followed.