Today is the 1 month anniversary of Passive Family Income! I know it is only 1 month old and there is a long way to go, but it is still very exciting to me. As part of this 1 month celebration, I wanted to discuss my philosophy on placing advertisements on this blog and to provide a review of one of the current advertisers found on this site.
My personal philosophy for this site is to only include advertisements that I can personally recommend. To date, I have included the following advertisements on this site: Prosper, www.GoDaddy.com , and Restaurant.com. You will never see any Google AdSense on this site. Not that I dislike them any, or wouldn’t go to any site that has AdSense advertisments on it. It is just that I don’t have any experience using AdSense, nor do I really care about placing that kind of information on this site. Besides the 3 advertisers I mentioned earlier, I am also currently experimenting with LinkWords but will probably be pulling them off shortly.
So now to my review. As I had stated earlier, I have included an advertisement for Restaurant.com on this site. I have used them several times (for personal use and for gifts) and would recommend them to anyone. I have been very pleased with their products so far. The concept is fairly simple used by Restaurant.com. When you go to their site, you enter your zip code and find a list of affiliate restaurants that they offer deals for. The number is somewhat limited, but you normally can find a decent number of affiliated restaurants within a 15 mile radius. The type of offers usually fall into one of two categories -
- $25 Gift Certificate - You can typically get a $25 gift certificate to most of the affiliated restaurants for $10
- $10 Gift Certificate - You can also usually get a $10 gift certificate for $3
Once you find the gift certificate you like, you simply pay online and print it out. It is as simple as that. Now, I will say that most restaurants have conditions on when and how you can use the gift certificate. Some require a minimum purchase (i.e. $35 when using a $25 gift certificate) and most seem to be only valid Sunday - Thursday, or some just for lunch. If you can get past having to go out to eat on a Friday or Saturday, then it is a very good deal.
There are also special occasions when Restaurant.com will even offer additional discounts. They typically run these types of promotions every couple of weeks and they are normally for 50%, 60%, or even 70% off the amount you pay to get the gift certificate. My wife and I recently purchased a pair of gift certificates to a restaurant for my in-laws for their anniversary. We used one of the special promotions that Restaurant.com was offering and got 2 of their $25 gift certificates for 70% off. The normal cost of purchasing these gift certificates would have been $20. However, because of the special promotion, we got both gift certificates for $6!!! Not to bad. This particular restaurant only allowed the gift certificate to be used Sunday - Thursday and required a minimum purchase of $35. But even if my in-laws spent $40 on their meal, they would pay $15 out of pocket combined with the $3 we spent for a grand total of $18 for a $40 meal.
You can sign up on the Restaurant.com website to get email alerts when they run these special deals or you can find when they run them by searching the web. I will also be posting links to the deals when they come up.
Have you ever used Restaurant.com before? What was your experience like? Do you think it is a good deal? What other things do you do to save money when eating out?
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Dawn 05.30.08 at 4:11 pm
I haven’t used them, but I will certainly check it out! Thanks for the tip!
PS Happy one month anniversary!
Ralph 05.31.08 at 11:33 pm
Hey Passive, I wanted to let you know that this blog post throws an error when I load it in MSIE at work and at home. It loads fine with firefox though.
My wife and I used to use restaurant.com before we moved, but there just aren’t enough restaurants that we like available here. It’s unfortunate, because it was a nice way to save when eating out. :/
passivefamilyincome 06.02.08 at 4:03 am
Thanks for letting me know about the error in IE for this post. Not sure what is going on with it but I will check it out. Thanks again!
Ralph 06.02.08 at 11:10 pm
The bug is still happening. I have narrowed the issue down to your post pages. It doesn’t happen on the index page. I don’t mind using firefox to view your blog, but I would imagine others with the same version of IE as me will have the same problem.
passivefamilyincome 06.03.08 at 6:33 am
Thanks again Ralph. I think I figured out the problem. When you get the chance, can you let me know if you still see the same problem in IE? I don’t get it anymore after making the change. I really appreciate your help!
Ralph 06.03.08 at 10:36 pm
It’s not crashing my browser, yay! The only thing I notice now is something is trying to load from socialspark.com, but it isn’t hindering the visiting experience and it could be an intermittent connectivity issue.
Thank you very much for looking into it.
passivefamilyincome 06.04.08 at 7:38 am
Ralph - Thanks again for your help. I realized there were a couple of html tags I did not close for some reason. I also fixed the issue with the socialspark.com load. The two issues you noted were actually related. Thanks again for your feedback.