The idea

As I’ve written before, on overnight youth trips I like to embed my Twitter account’s RSS feed into our youth group website so parents can get the play-by-play action of our trip while we’re gone. They love it for so many reasons!

Now that our new youth group website includes a special LiveStream just for our group’s online social activity, I’m taking the mobile updates to a new level for this summer’s youth group trips. Instead of all the web updates, mobile pictures and videos coming solely from me, I’ve opened it up so all the kids on the trip can contribute to our LiveStream while we’re away. I think there’s a couple benefits of this:

• All the kids feel like they have some ownership in sharing the story with what’s going on.
• Parents can see and read the trip from the perspective of the teenagers.
• Parents feel included and have a lot to talk about with their teen when they get home besides asking, “So how was it?”
• We have an ongoing “digital scrapbook” of pictures, short video clips and updates for every trip. Everyone can contribute to it.

How to set it up

I’ve already explained how to setup the website for collecting all the updates. The rest of it is really quite simple. It basically entails setting up a couple email addresses and passing them on to the kids to send updates, pictures and videos to.

1. Set up a Twitter account for your youth group. Twitter is limited to receiving updates from only one mobile device, so I use TwitterMail.com to setup a special email address for the youth group’s twitter account that can receive messages from anyone. Any message sent to that special email address is automatically posted to our Twitter feed.

2. Set up a TwitPic account for your youth group. TwitPic.com allows users to take a picture with their mobile phone and post it to their Twitter updates. Again, you’ll get a secret email address to send pictures to that will automatically publish the images to Twitter.

3. Set up a YouTube account for your youth group. Then grab the mobile “secret address” for your YouTube account. Any videos that are taken with a cell phone and sent to that address will automatically be added to your YouTube account.

Once all your youth group accounts are setup, plug each one of them in to the Lifestream WordPress Plugin you setup on your youth group’s WordPress website.

Then, right before the trip, give the teenagers the “secret addresses” for Twittermail, TwitPic and YouTube and let ‘em loose (within reason, of course). I recommend encouraging them to add the email addresses to their cell phones as individual contacts for easy access. And it might be best to ensure that you or someone at home has access to moderating the messages through the plugin throughout the trip just in case something inappropriate is posted.

And no, teens do not have to send messages as an email for this to work. Sending a text message, picture message or video message to an email address works just fine for most mobile providers and does not usually require a data plan or incur extra charges beyond their normal messaging plan.

For advanced users

Since I plan on utilizing this for most of our overnight trips, I want the kids to be able to use the same “secret addresses” over and over again without having to update the contacts in their phone for every trip. But neither do I want them to be able to continue updating the LiveStream on our site randomly throughout the year. I want to control when they can and can’t update our youth group website with those addresses.

So I went into our webhost’s control panel and created an email forwarding address for each of the services: one for the TwitterMail address, one for TwitPic address, and one for YouTube address. (For example, trippics@alexandriayouth.com forwards all messages to our secret TwitPic address and tripupdates@alexandriayouth.com forwards all mail to our TwitterMail secret address.) Instead of handing out the original secret addresses, I instead hand out the forwarding addresses to kids so they can use them on every trip. For the time between trips, I will delete the forwarding addresses so no messages pass through to the social stream during that time.

Plus, it just looks cool to use addresses from your own domain.

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Support Life In Student Ministry by checking out MinistryWebsites.biz for easy, simple and effective web communication for your ministry.

Look what I got for FREE!

Six months ago I told you all about how I got a free Xbox 360 Elite, iPod Touch and more for free. I try not to blog about this too often because some of you think this is a scam and some of you just get too envious, but for everyone else, twice a year doesn’t feel like too much to keep you updated on the free stuff I earn and information on how you can get these items for free, too.

Since my last post on freebie sites 6 months ago, I’ve earned a free Canon HD video camera, and external microphone for it, and a Macbook for my wife. All for free. Not bad, eh? Here are some proof pictures. (Click an image to see it larger.)

How it works

1. Companies (like Blockbuster, for example) are looking for new potential customers to try out their products and services.

2. Blockbuster goes to the Bonus Network and says, “Hey, we’ll give you $80 for every customer you send our way to try out our online DVD rental service.” (Some advertisers pay Bonus Network $80, some pay them $40.)

3. So Bonus Network comes to you and says, “If you try out Blockbuster’s service and refer other people to try it through us, or one of our other advertising partner’s services, we’ll split the $80 with you for each person you recruit.”

4. You try out Blockbuster’s service and get 6 other people to try it, too (or another product/service offered through Bonus Network’s site) by giving your friends and family a special link that Bonus provides for you to share. (Of course, your friends can then get people to sign-up under their special link so they can work toward a free prize, too, but know that the people they refer have no benefit for you.)

5. After your 6 friends try a product or service, Bonus Network says, “Thanks! We’ll give you $240 ($40/referral x 6 referrals) or an iPod Touch. Which do you want?”

6. About a week later, your prize shows up in the mail, or your money shows up in your PayPal account.

Interview with co-owner of Bonus Network

Last October I interviewed a co-owner of the Bonus Network, Fehz, about his company and how it all works. Watch it below:

List of Bonus Network sites

*The login you create at one Bonus Network site is valid for all the other sites.

Prizes	Sign-up Link	100% Legit
iPod Touch, Nano, Classic, Shuffle, cash	BonusiPod.com
iPhone, Apple gift card, cash	BonusiPhone.com
Wii, Wii Fit, cash	BonusWii.com
Xbox 360, Halo 3 edition, Xbox 360 Elite, cash	BonusXbox360.com
PlayStation 3 (40 GB), PlayStation 3 (80 GB), cash	BonusPS3.com
Laptops from Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, more, cash	BonusLaptops.com
Plasma TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG, more, cash	BonusPlasmas.com

Common excuses

Most people would love to earn some of these free prizes, but there’s three common excuses:

1. It’s a scam!
2. I’ll get hit with a ton of spam mail.
3. Completing offers costs more than the prize itself!
4. I don’t think I can get others to complete referrals for me.

For #1, check out my story above and the links below. I’ve done it several times and received several prizes, so I know it’s not a scam.

Concerning #2, I have not received one single shred of spam as a result of completing these trial offers or freebie sites, not via email nor postal mail. These companies actually have pretty aggressive privacy statements.

Number 3 also is not true. I’ve paid about a total of $100 out-of-pocket for all these free things combined. The most I ever paid for a single offer was $24.98 for a sheet of photo stamps. Most offers cost between absolutely nothing and $15. Some of the services I stuck with past the trial because I really liked what they offered. Some of them I didn’t like and canceled when the trial period was over. There’s no commitment either way, except that you complete the offer and give it a fair chance.

And about #4, check out this post I wrote that gives 10 ideas for how to earn referrals for your freebie site. They work for me, anyway. It may take some patience and persistence to get the first prize (especially if you’re going for a big one), but after it shows up on your doorstep and you have physical proof for the skeptics, all the other prizes flow in pretty easily. In fact, after I got my Xbox 360 Elite, I tried for the 16 GB iPod Touch and it took only 5 days to get all the referrals I needed!

My other prizes

For almost two years now I’ve been getting free stuff from freebie sites online. The list of prizes I’ve received is too long to name each item individually, but here’s a start:

• FREE Xbox 360 Elite, 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, Halo 3
• FREE 16 GB iPod Touch
• FREE 32 GB iPod Touch
• Canon HD video camera, external mic for the video camera, Macbook. See above. (I took cash prizes and purchased these items on my own.)
• and thousands of dollars in cash from the iPhone site, PS3 site, Wii site, and more.

If you have any questions about the process, I’ve done it many many times, so feel free to ask in the comments below. Fehz, a co-owner of the Bonus Network, will also be around this post in case you have any questions for him, too.

Our online communication has changed

One of the most important aspects of any ministry is communication. Two years ago one of the main places that took place for our group was through our website, AlexandriaYouth.com. Over the years, however, the way we communicate online morphed and our youth group’s website effectiveness dropped. I think it was due to a couple reasons:

• Teens dropped our site’s interactive features (like forums and live chat) for Facebook
• It was cluttered with too much information
• The home page was overloaded
• The site had too many target audiences, causing us to hit none of them

Our response in the new website

It was time to make adjustments and overhaul the youth group website, so last week I hunkered down and cranked out a new AlexandriaYouth.com that reflects some of the trends of how we communicate online.

• It’s simple. There’s not a lot of navigation menus, sidebars, and trails to follow. Pretty much everything you’re looking for is found right on the front page.
• We decided to use Facebook to our advantage by hosting as much media and information on our Alexandria Youth Facebook Page as possible.
• The site’s target audience is our youth group teenagers. There’s a little bit of information for perspective visitors and parents, but not much.
• To reflect the “status update” trend of social media, we’ve added a livestream of random photos, videos, and updates that I can easily update from my cell phone throughout the day, especially while we’re gone on youth trips (parents love it!). It aggregates all my youth group posts from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in one place.

How I put the site together

For the nerds out there, here’s how I put it together:

• It’s built on WordPress. (No more Joomla!)
• I’m using the free Irresistable theme from WooThemes.
• The livestream is powered by the Lifestream plugin for WordPress.
• I use the Selective Twitter Facebook App to have youth group tweets update our Facebook Page status and the livestream on our site so they all stay in sync. (I removed line 110 in extensions.php in the Lifestream plugin so the “#fb” in twitter updates don’t show up on our site.)
• The calendar is obviously Google Calendar with a simple copy and paste of embed code (technically iframe code, but whatever). Just make sure you made the calendars public.

That’s really all there is to it. Pretty simple, just the way I like it.

If you’re looking for a webhost to build something like this yourself, I’d recommend the host I use for AlexandriaYouth.com, Buyhttp.com, because they don’t oversell their shared servers (i.e. cram too many accounts on one server and overload it) and their support for WordPress is pretty solid. Alternatively, for an easier hosted solution you don’t have to mess with, you could check out my side-business, MinistryWebsites.biz.

Social media we’re using

The social media we’re using is Twitter, Facebook Page, and YouTube.

I chose to stick with YouTube for video on our website instead of Facebook because Facebook’s video embed code sometimes glitches on our site and the dimensions are wrong if you view it on Facebook while not logged in. Plus, YouTube offers better streaming for people with slower Internet connections. So I post our youth group news videos on both YouTube (for our site) and on Facebook (for people who see it there).

Feel free to ask questions about any of this in the comments below.

[ Visit AlexandriaYouth.com ]

I probably should’ve blogged about this a while ago for you guys since a lot of your graduation parties and events are probably over, but if you’re like me, it’s coming up this weekend.

Animoto.com is the easiest to quickly create professional looking video slideshows from all the pictures you’ve collected of your seniors over the years. Upload your photos, add your own soundtrack, Animoto analyzes the music, and melds it with the photos in a way that feels somewhat like MTV video.

A free account will get you unlimited 30-second slideshows, so if you want something longer than that you’ll have to pay $3 per video or upgrade to an All Access account for $30/year. Alternatively, I heard some churches are scoring free All Access accounts through Animoto’s “For A Cause” program. (Click on “a cause” at the bottom of the screen on their site.)

Here’s a video I made a couple weeks ago mostly with Animoto.com for our Volunteer Appreciation Sunday at church. (I used iMovie to put our church’s intro and outro on it.) Check out our Volunteer Appreciation video on YouTube.

[ Visit Animoto.com ]

This guest post is contributed by Chris Szulwach. We all love movie nights with the youth group, but most of us are unaware of the legal issues surrounding such events. Chris is a youth pastor who has done a lot of research in this area, including consultation with copyright lawyers and experts. The following is a summary of his research.

Ok, raise your hand if you’ve ever actually read that little FBI warning at the beginning of a movie! Well, lucky (and unlucky) for us that little warning has absolutely nothing to do with showing a movie in a youth ministry setting.

Over my years in youth ministry I have moved through the following progression when it comes to the issue of movies and copyrights.

• intentional ignorance on the matter of copyright law
• learning a little about it and then not really caring too much
• taking the copyright issue pretty seriously

About 7 or 8 years ago, when everyone was rocking Napster (the illegal predecessor to napster.com) I began to do some research on the reasons why breaking the music copyright was so bad. Hopefully, all of us are now on board with that issue by now, but that issue got me thinking about other areas of copyright law.

I’ve realized that as a representative of Christ in my community and as a model for my church, I need to “play by the rules” in order to not only live a “life that is above reproach,” but simply so I’m not stealing from others.

On to talking about movies, though…

Common Misconceptions

1. The FBI warning says that I can’t charge money for people to watch the movie so my event is ok.
The FBI warning actually pertains to an individual showing a movie within their home.

2. As long I am using the movie as a church event I am within the copyright laws.
This is a false statement because the only instance in which a movie may be screened, outside of a home, without a license, is in a non-profit educational setting with “face-to-face instruction.”

3. If I make a lesson out of the movie I want to show I will be within the copyright laws.
A non-profit educational setting has previously been specifically defined as a non-profit academic institution. The main activity of a church is not academics.

4. My church has the CVLI license, so we can show movies at any church event that we do.
This license only pertains to a church showing movies “in its facility(ies.)” This means that if you have a current CVLI license, you may show any legally obtained movie in your church property. (See points 1 and 4 on this page at CVLI.com.)

Also, the CVLI license only covers those movies “produced and/or distributed by CVLI affiliated motion picture companies only,” according to point 6. But you may be able to contact the motion picture company and get written permission to show the movie. As the copyright holder, if it is the copyright holder, it can waive its rights and grant a church or ministry permission to show the movie. If you want to do this, do it well in advance, the process is s l o w.

5. I can throw up a sheet, a PA system, and a projector to show the movie in the back yard of the church because I am within the church property.
The CVLI license specifically says that movies can be screened in its facilities. Upon speaking to a representative at CVLI, I pressed for clarification of “in facilities.” The answer that I got was that you would most likely be within the spirit of the agreement if the movie was screened outdoors only if in a secluded area where there was no chance that someone from the general public would see or hear any portion of the movie that was being screened.

6. Since I’m not charging a fee, I am showing the movie inside of my church, and I have the CVLI license, I can advertise my event in any fashion that I want.
In case you missed reading point 4 of the CVLI terms, “No specific titles, or any characters from such titles, or producers’ names will be advertised or publicized to the general public unless authorized by certain producers.”

Much more info on this topic can be found at:

• http://www.cvli.com/about/terms.cfm
• http://www.copyright.gov
• http://www.mplc.org/faq.php

So what should you do!?

• Make sure that your church has a current CVLI license.
• Only show movies at a youth ministry event within your church or at a camp location that has its own license since the license is restricted to a physical location.
• Invite a few students over to your house, where you show a movie inside, with out any advertising of any sort through your church.

It is possible to still do a movie event for the public, you’ll need to procure a license from mplc.org but make sure you follow their guidelines.

I hope this helps clear up some of the movie copyright confusion. Of course, there are a ton of other areas that I could have addressed, but I’m not a copyright lawyer, I’m a youth pastor. So, I am not giving you any legal advice on this matter, just a few tips and pointers. If you have questions about your situation it would be best to chat with your church’s attorney or speak directly with an attorney who specializes in copyright law since this is a very in depth area of law (which you noticed if you checked out copyright.gov).

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Chris Szulwach is a youth pastor in Liverpool, NY. Chris has 11 years experience as a volunteer, para-church staff, and as a pastor.
Blog: CoffeeWithChris.com | YouthMinBlog.com
Twitter: twitter.com/CoffeeWithChris

The guys at Animoto.com have been nice enough to give me another set of FREE 3-month All Access passes to give away to five of you all. If you’re not familiar with Animoto.com, it’s a website that makes amazing video slideshows from your pictures. Upload your pictures, add your own soundtrack, it analyzes the music, and melds the two together in a way that feels somewhat like MTV video. You can either upload your pictures manually or send Animoto to fetch them from other sites like your Facebook account, Picasa, or Flickr. Adding music works the same way: upload your own mp3 or select a track from their growing library of music beds, including many Christian artists like Steven Curtis Chapman, TobyMac, and Jeremy Camp. For an extra measure of fun, you can remix the pics and music again and again to get other versions of your slideshow. No two videos are ever the same. It’s definitely worth checking out for transforming all your youth group pictures into very professional videos. In fact, here’s one I made a while back for our missions trip last summer.

Belize Missions 2008 Pictures

Thirty-second clips are free, or you can upgrade to an unlimited All Access pass for $30/year.

OR, you can win a 3-month All Access pass to Animoto.com by contributing to MinistryQuestions.com. I’ll give away one All Access pass every Wednesday for the next 5 weeks to the top user on the Weekly Top User Chart (excluding myself and any previous winners). This chart is based on the number of points you earn. Although you can earn points by asking questions, posting answers, and responding to debates, the fastest way is to be awarded points from others on the site. This is done by rating each other’s questions, answers, and debates with the star ratings in the red division bar below each user’s response. If you think someone gave a good answer, give them some points! If you think they asked an excellent question, give them some points! If you see someone was awarded 4 points for a question, but you think it’s only worth 1, give them a one-star rating and lower the point value of that question. Points are determined by both you and your peers, so have fun!

Head to MinistryQuestions.com and join a community of ministry workers who will invest into your ministry as you invest into others.

1. TxtSignal.com: $30/month

With a couple of my youth group kids burning through 18,000 text messages in one month each (yes, seriously!), it almost seems remiss not to use it to communicate with teens. I use TxtSignal.com to send announcements and last-minute reminders, cancel events, send daily devotional thoughts, run contests, share prayer requests, and get quick feedback about a question or idea, and more. It’s definitely our #1 most effective tool for communicating with teens in our ministry. Although the TxtSignal.com plan I use runs $30/month, you can get plans as cheap as $10/month with a 30-day FREE trial.

2. Youth group website: $15/month

In my youth ministry, our website is the #2 most effective tool we have for mass communicating news and announcements. Although there are places to get free websites (like WordPress.com), I opted to purchase a web hosting plan and build it myself so we could more flexibility in how we use it. Check out the tutorial I wrote about how to build an interactive youth group website for more on what the site entails and how you can build one, too. Of course, you could always check out my own website service at MinistryWebsites.biz and help support the ongoing work here at Life In Student Ministry.

3. Covenant Eyes: $8/month

I have Covenant Eyes installed on every computer in my house. It logs every web page I visit and sends a weekly email report to a couple people for accountability. As a guy in ministry, it is absolutely imperative that I protect my integrity. In case an accusation is ever made, I have reports on record. Definitely worth the $8/month! Use promo code “youthministry” to get the first 30 days free!

4. Volunteer appreciation gifts: varies

Without adult youth workers, there would be no youth ministry. They serve in so many ways, giving up so much of their time, energy and resources, and they absolutely must be thanked. Occasional gifts and thank-you cards can never repay all that they give to teens and the ministry, but it’s better than nothing. In my ministry’s youth budget, I seem to always overspend the “Volunteer appreciation” line item, and they are totally worth it.

5. Animoto.com: $30/year

If you saw the Christmas greeting video from me and Dana, you’ve seen a sample of what Animoto.com does. It takes your digital pictures from your latest youth event, lets you add some titles and music, and spits out a video that is entertaining and very professional. It’s a great way to share memories with the congregation and preserve the experience for kids online. An unlimited pass for the site costs $30/year, but 30-second clips are free if that’s sufficient for you. Sign up at Animoto.com.

I love supporting you and your ministry! With the on-going work of the free missions trip, Freebie Fridays, LIVE YM Talks, weekly youth ministry training videos, and more, they all require funds. Most organizations reimburse themselves by charging you to access their resources, materials and ideas, but since I want to keep everything free, I need to find alternative ways to fund these projects.

Extending youth ministry advice and mentoring online

One of the largest undertakings is the Youth Ministry Mentorship Program, where new youth workers have one-on-one mentoring with a youth ministry veteran for 10 weeks straight, plus they get a slew of books and resources, all for FREE! The demand for the mentorship has been overwhelming. Hundreds of new youth workers apply for each round from all over the world, seeking one-on-one advice, training and input into their ministry to teenagers. Unfortunately, only 13 of them can be accepted into the program for each 10-week round.

I have an idea of how to extend this mentoring, advice, and help to youth workers all over the world online for free, but it will take some initial start-up funds to purchase the scripts, pay designers, and set it all up.

Asking for your support

I’ve never done this before, but people on Twitter encouraged me to do it, so here you go: Since everything else at Life In Student Ministry is completely free, I’m asking that if this is something you believe in, would you mind contributing toward this project of providing youth ministry advice online? My goal is to launch it in mid-January along side of the next YM Mentorship round. The cost of $700 is the bare-minimum to get it launched, so anything above and beyond that is greatly appreciated to compensate my time and server resources. (Monthly costs thereafter will only be the server fees that I already pay anyway.)

Other ways to support Life In Student Ministry

Here’s how I currently support the expenses and the various Life In Student Ministry projects. Any way you can help is greatly appreciated!

1. Link to me.
I know it doesn’t seem like much, but it really helps. Incoming links increase my Google rankings, which means more traffic, a larger audience, and thus higher value for the site’s one (small) advertising space, more Google ad clicks, and higher revenue.

2. Complete a freebie site.
Sign up under one of my referral links for a free iPod Touch, Xbox 360, Wii, Laptop, or whatever and complete two trial offers. Once you’ve done so, I get $50. Plus, after you refer a couple people, you get a free iPod Touch or another prize out of the deal!

3. Donate via PayPal.
Obviously, the easiest and simplest way for both of us is to just donate via PayPal.

4. Buy a ministry website.
In October I started MinistryWebsites.biz, a small business that provides websites for ministries as a way to support the ongoing efforts of Life In Student Ministry. MinistryWebsites.biz gives you a state-of-the-art system for building and maintaining a website that is so simple, intuitive and easy to use. Check it out and sign up for your FREE 3-page website to check it out.

5. Sign-up for a year of service at Animoto.com
In case you’re not familiar with Animoto.com, they make it easy to create very professional videos from your digital photos. For an example, check out the Christmas greetings video I made for me and Dana this year. The guys at Animoto.com have been gracious enough to toss me a couple bucks whenever someone signs up for their $30/year All Access Pass using this link.

Thank you for your investment into teenagers and youth workers around the world!

Over the past two weeks, I posted a couple articles about using video to communicate with youth group kids. The first one talked about why online video can be such an effective communication tool for youth groups, and the second one gave more of a step-by-step how to make the videos with links to all the resources I use.

The glaring oversight that’s missing in both of those posts is where to put the videos on the web once your content is created. Here are my recommendations, each with pros and cons.

YouTube

YouTube has only two things going for it: it’s extremely popular and it’s social. Other than that, YouTube is honestly a horrible place to host your videos because the video quality is very poor and the only distribution methods are to link to it or embed it in your site. Fortunately, YouTube now has a “watch high quality version” feature linked under some of the videos, but even then the quality is still poor and there’s no way to embed the high quality video in your site or link to it directly.

Use YouTube as an outreach
However, I still recommend that you keep your youth group video episodes shorter than 10 minutes so you can post them on YouTube. Why? Because that’s where kids know to look and search for them. Besides, now that Google owns YouTube, their videos tend to rank fairly well in search engines. Just be sure to tag your YouTube videos with your church name, youth group name, town and state so when random kids in your community search to see, “What’s going on in my town on YouTube?” they find your youth group. It’s an easy way to do outreach! If your youth group has a website, put that URL in the very beginning of your video’s description so viewers to see it right away and visit your site for more info about your ministry.

[ Visit YouTube.com. ]

Vimeo

Vimeo is geared toward professional and amateur film developers and thus has amazing video quality and full support for HD (high definition) content. You can create “channels,” which is basically a brandable page that displays all your latest youth group videos, latest udpates from an RSS feed, custom URL, and more. Plus, Vimeo makes it easy to distribute videos by putting the embed code right in the video itself for people to copy and paste. Although free accounts are limited to 500 MB uploads per week, that should be more than enough for most people’s needs. Other than that, the service is phenomenal. The only reason I don’t use them for my youth group videos and the Life In Student Ministry video posts is because it lacks iTunes compatible RSS feeds, which Blip.tv offers.

[ Visit Vimeo.com ]

Blip.tv

Blip.tv is my choice until Vimeo adds a couple key features that I want. Blip.tv offers pretty much everything you could think of and it does it all for free: amazing video quality, customizable video players for your website, a simple interface, unlimited uploads, and an RSS feed that you can plug into iTunes as a video podcast in less than 60 seconds. The iTunes feature really is the selling point for me over Vimeo right now because if my youth group kids subscribe to the video podcast in iTunes, they can easily sync it with their iPods and watch the episodes on the bus, in the car, on a treadmill at the gym, or wherever else they want.

[ Visit Blip.tv ]

Facebook

Of course, if you have a Facebook group or page for your youth group, remember to upload your video episodes there, too. Just be sure that you don’t have any copyrighted material in it (like a music background from song or something) because Facebook will take it down pretty quickly, at least they did with my old ones before I started using only royalty free content.

[ Visit Facebook.com ]

It’s been a couple months since I’ve posted about this and, since Life In Student Ministry has hundreds of new readers since then, I wanted to share this with everyone again, especially the new-comers. Welcome!

For over a year now I’ve been getting free stuff from freebie sites online. The list of prizes I’ve received is too long to name each item individually, but here’s a start:

• FREE Xbox 360 Elite, 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, Halo 3
• FREE 16 GB iPod Touch
• FREE 32 GB iPod Touch
• and thousands of dollars in cash from the iPhone site, PS3 site, Wii site, and more.

Check out those links above for pictures and screenshots of the free iPod Touches, Xbox 360 Elite, and PayPal cash payments as proof that I really do get this stuff for free. For example, here’s the 16 GB iPod Touch I got for free and the Xbox 360 Elite I also got for FREE (click to see full-size):

Interview with co-owner of Bonus Network

Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to interview a co-owner of the Bonus Network, the company I use that gives all this stuff (and more) away. Watch it below:

List of Bonus Network sites

*The login you create at one Bonus Network site is valid for all the other sites.

Prizes	Sign-up Link	100% Legit
iPod Touch, Nano, Classic, Shuffle, cash	BonusiPod.com
iPhone, Apple gift card, cash	BonusiPhone.com
Wii, Wii Fit, cash	BonusWii.com
Xbox 360, Halo 3 edition, Xbox 360 Elite, cash	BonusXbox360.com
PlayStation 3 (40 GB), PlayStation 3 (80 GB), cash	BonusPS3.com
Laptops from Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, more, cash	BonusLaptops.com
Plasma TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG, more, cash	BonusPlasmas.com

How it works

1. Click one the sites listed above and sign up there to create an account.

2. Complete 1 or 2 trial offers (like Blockbuster, Netflix, a credit history check for $1.00, etc.) to reach 100% credit (found under the “Offers” tab when logged in to the Bonus site).

3. Use the your referral link found on the “Status” page of your account to give to other people to sign up for the site and also complete 1 or 2 trail offers.

4. Once they do so, receive your prize for FREE!

My story

It honestly isn’t any more difficult than that. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I promise it is 100% credible. I’ve received so many prizes that I actually stopped blogging about each one as to not annoy you all with it each time. Seriously, just try it out. I guarantee it works and is completely legitimate.

My total out-of-pocket expenses for all the trial offers combined that I’ve completed is about $100. Not bad for an Xbox 360 Elite, Xbox Live Gold, Halo 3, two iPod Touches and thousands of dollars in cash! Some of the offers are even completely free and others cost only $1.00. Just try out an advertiser’s service for a period of time, get some friends to do the same through your Bonus Network referral link, and you get your free prize. Here’s a summary I wrote a while back about my experiences with some of the trial offers I’ve completed so far. (Note that not all of the offers I mention are still available.)

Here are 10 ideas for getting referrals, which is exactly how I earn them myself. And after your first prize shows up, it becomes very easy to earn more because now you have proof for anyone who is skeptical. After I got my Xbox 360 Elite, I tried for an iPod Touch and it took only 5 days to get all the referrals I needed because everyone actually saw my Xbox and knew it would work, because it does!

And as Fehz said in the video above, Bonus Network guarantees that you will receive credit for any trial offer you do with an advertiser through them, even in the rare case that something goes wrong with it. All you have to do is send Bonus a copy of your confirmation email from the advertiser and they will gladly give you full credit for your efforts, so there’s really no risk in trying it.

Common excuses

Most people would love to earn some of these free prizes, but there’s three common excuses:

1. It’s a scam!
2. I’ll get hit with a ton of spam mail.
3. Completing offers costs more than the prize itself!
4. I don’t think I can get others to complete referrals for me.

For #1, check out the links above. I’ve done it several times and received several prizes, so I know it’s not a scam. Concerning #2, I have not received one single shred of spam as a result of completing these trial offers or freebie sites, not via email nor postal mail. These companies actually have pretty aggressive privacy statements. Number 3 also is not true. As I said above, I’ve paid about a total of $100 out-of-pocket for all these free things combined. The most I ever paid for a single offer was $24.98 for a sheet of photo stamps. Most offers cost between absolutely nothing and $5. And about #4, check out this post I wrote that gives 10 ideas for how to earn referrals for your freebie site. They work for me, anyway!

If you have any questions about the process, I’ve done it many many times, so feel free to ask in the comments below. Fehz, a co-owner of the Bonus Network, will also be around this post in case you have any questions for him, too.