There are probably hundreds of free gift cards offers available at any time on the Internet. You’d like to get the biggest gift card you can while fulfilling the least number of program requirements. In this way you get the most for your time and effort. (For some gift card promotions, the offers are good enough that you are interested in 7 but they only require that you fulfill 5. In this case, look for a bigger gift card or a second gift card and fulfill the extra 2 that way – your willingness to fulfill these offers is worth money, no reason to give the extras away.)

1) Search for Free Gift Card Promotions

As I stated before there are probably hundreds of free gift card promotions on the Internet at any given time. Obviously you don’t want to go searching for these offers using Google. You’d be looking for days. So go to offers page on the free gift card wiki. If you are simply looking for a gift card start with the 5 star offers. If you have a particular store in mind then search offers by store name. If you are generically looking for something like baby gear then search the offers by their type or category.

2) Determine the number of offers required at each level for program fulfillment

Each free gift card promotion will have “Program Requirements”. Program requirements typically consist of offers at each promotion level – Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Each promotion level consists of free trials offers or small purchases. Since most of these gift card promotions have the same promotional offer choices a good first guess at an offer’s competitiveness is to compare the number of Silver, Gold and Platinum offers required for each gift card vs. the gift card’s payout.

At the time of this writing (June 2009) the typical requirements for a $1000 gift card is the completion of 2 Silver, 2 Gold, and 9 Platinum offers. However, this changes over time. If you don’t want to do the math to compare these offers side-by-side you can go to the free gift card wiki (see the url at the end of this article). Each offer in the free gift card wiki offer index has a rating. Start with the 5 star offers first.

3)Print Out offers at each level for each gift card promotion

Pick out 5 to 10 offers. Enter an email or zip at each to get to the offer pages. I recommend creating a new email address for these gift cards. The promoters will email you and you don’t want to be filtering out their emails from your friends and family or your work emails.

While most of the offers at are the same or similar across gift card promotions they are not always identical. Also, the offers for 2 gift cards may be identical but they may show up at different levels (Silver, Gold, or Platinum) from one gift card to the other.

So print out the offers at each level for each card and compare them. You will be more comfortable with some offers than others. For example, most people would find a free Netflix trial harmless but some people may have had a bad experience with Netflix so they will choose another offer instead.

4)Compare programs and narrow choices to 3

In a short period of time you will be able to narrow your choices from 10 to 3. You do this primarily by deciding which Silver, Gold and Platinum offer sets give you the best choices for your tastes.

If you are having a hard time narrowing the list then narrow it by choosing your favorite store or product. Or narrow it down the gift card promotions where have at least 1 more offer that you like than they require – i.e., if they require 2 then you have at least 3 offers at that level that you like.

5)Review Terms & Conditions for each of the 3 gift card promotions

Reviewing the Terms & Conditions can take several minutes so I only recommend you do this after you’ve narrowed your list down to 3 free gift cards.

While reviewing the Terms & Conditions seems like a pain, I highly recommend you do so. That way there are no rude surprises after you’ve completed any of the Silver, Gold or Platinum offers. Also, contact information for the gift card promoter is usually in the Terms & Conditions or Gift Rules pages (but not all offers have a Gift Rules page).

6)Contact gift card promoter for full list of requirements & clarification

If the free gift card offer provides a way to contact the promoter I recommend doing so (preferably via email). You want to ask them for a full list, in English not lawyer speak, of the program requirements. Also, if you have any questions at all I would ask for clarification – don’t assume you know the answer.

7)Choose offers to fulfill

By this point you will have a good idea as to which free gift card you want to pursue based on the offers and the terms of the program requirements.

Pick out the Silver, Gold, and Platinum offers you intend to fulfill. Circle them on your print outs. (If the promoter was easy to contact then I would send them a list of the offers you intend to fulfill before fulfilling any of them. Ask them if these offers would fulfill the program requirements.)

Each gift card is a little different. Each gift card needs to be assessed before fulfilling any program offers. Save yourself time and money by visiting my free gift card wiki.

There’s a limit on this site as to the amount of detail I can provide. If you want to know more than I can provide here I suggest you sign up for my free gift card tutorial here.