FREMONT, SEATTLE, WA :: A shiny, new iPod arrived at our door today. I received it for free from Gratis at www.freeipods.com! If you're wondering how it works and would like to get your own, read on:

Gratis is a lead referral business for companies such as Blockbuster, eBay, The Wall Street Journal, BMG, Video Professor, etc. These companies agree to pay Gratis approximately $50 per verifiable lead. To get a free iPod, Gratis wants you to sign up for an introductory offer from one of these companies, and then convince five of your friends to do the same. If you and five others sign up, Gratis earns $300 - enough to pay for your free iPod. Gratis still makes an incredible amount of money because only a small percentage of people will actually get five of their friends to sign up. Most will only get one or two.

You can cancel the offer you signed up for after receiving credit for it from Gratis. I signed up for the Blockbuster offer. It's a service similiar to Netflix, but it's cheaper, faster, and in case you're feeling spontaneous, they give you an additional two free rentals every month from any of their stores. It turns out it's a great deal, so I'm going to try it out for a while, even though I could have cancelled during the two week trial with no cost to me.

Here's a big tip: If you don't have five friends or you don't want to bother them, you can invest $25 into a Google Adword (these are the small text ads that appear in the margin of Google search results). Use your referral link in one and have 25 people or more signup in less than a day. That's what I did. I created a catchy ad, bid $1 per click to place the ad above the others, and then chose some keywords, like "free ipod." Whenever someone in the United States searched for "free ipod" in Google, my ad appeared at the top of the page. About 25 people clicked on it, and of those, six people signed up! Very easy. It then takes approximately two weeks for the credit to appear for the offers, a week for Gratis to verify, and then another week to ship.

It's a little bit of work, a lot of waiting, and in my case, $25 to speed up the process. But $25 for a $300 gadget isn't a bad deal in my book. If you'd like to try it out, please use the referral link below (to help my parents get a free iPod!):

http://www.freeipods.com

Good luck!

UPDATE (Jan 10th): I got another free item from Gratis today! They sent me an "I Heart iPod" shirt to thank me. Jeesh, I thought I should be the one thanking them...

Many have asked for more information and if it really works. All I can say is it worked for me in exactly the way I described. Gratis doesn't guarantee anything, and neither do I. I checked the top bid for "free ipod" the other day and it is approaching $2 a click, so it may cost you more to get your referrals if you choose to use Google. Or it may be less, or it might not work at all. Again, good luck!