Using Social Media to Get Free Stuff

Using Social Media to Get Free Stuff [online pub companies]

You need a free banner? How about a free button for your Website? You can search for free stuff using Google or your favorite search engines but often times it is very brutal. You will find that most sites that show up in search engine results have a few crappy free offerings. They are selling their good stuff for a premium.

It is not fair that you want a few free buttons, backgrounds, or icons and Google dumps a crap load of useless results when you use the word free in search key phrases. There are plenty of sites with good quality free designs but they do not rank high in Google search results.

What do you do? Use Google but restrict your search results to social media sites only.

User submitted contents found in social media sites like Digg, RedDot, etc. are some of the best contents from all around the Web. These social media sites let users rank contents based on the quality. [online pub companies]

You get the double bonus. Not only thousands of users have scouted the Web to find the best freebies but also they have ranked those submissions based on their merits. You are able to leverage the crowd wisdom for free to get the free stuff. How sweet it is.

May be the results are crappy but Google is a very powerful search engine. To get the good stuff from the social media sites, instruct Google to return results from contents published in those sites.

Let's say you are looking for some icons. In Google search box type site:Digg.com "free icons" and hit enter. Google will return all results for "free icons" from Digg, a social media site.

The above technique may not land you directly on the source because many blog authors compile links to high quality free stuff from the Web and then publish the list on these social media sites. Though you don't go to the source directly but you get the right direction.

Here is a list of popular social media and blog sites that you can use using the site: operator in Google search. [online pub companies]

dig.com
del.icio.us
slashdot.com
RedDot.com
stumbleupon.com
blogmarks.com
technorati.com
bloglines.com
mybloglog.com
giveawayproject.com

Social media and crowd wisdom are new Web 2.0 paradigm. The collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the Globe are channeled through these new Web tools called social media. These sites offer new opportunities for information search and retrieval. Learn how to use them and leverage them for your benefits.