how diet coke, google and blogging saved me $161.26

Yesterday we got a disc of all the pictures from our photo shoot (I'll show a few more on here soon) and I decided that I best start putting together our holiday cards in order that we get them out relatively close to Christmas (give or take a few days).  I also thought it would be fun that while I was at it, to make up a photo book with a lot of the pictures from our photo shoot in it.  And here's how I went about it and saved a ton of money...

First, Shutterfly offered 50 free holiday cards this year to bloggers and I went to their site and put together our card:

Didn't it turn out great?  I loved having one that could include so many pictures on it.  Then I added it to my cart, entered the promo code they gave me for the 50 free cards and presto!... my total of $119.50 went down to $8.43 (shipping).  Wow!  I couldn't believe how much I saved!  I also tried to enter another code to zero out that shipping cost, but to no avail.  Sometimes sites will allow multiple codes and sometimes not (and sometimes codes can't be combined).  Ah, well.  I still figured my 50 cards for $8.43 wasn't too shabby.

So then next, I thought I should browse through our "my coke rewards" account to see what kind of picture rewards they had to offer (and look for my picture book I was hoping to get).  We started entering in their codes a few years back seeing as I consume massive quantities of diet coke every day.  It's surprising the things you can get from sometimes not too many points!  We have managed to get free 12 packs, photo calendars, free photo prints, restaurant gift cards and much more.  Anyway, as I was browsing through their picture rewards (and they use Snapfish on their site), I saw they were offering 50 prints free for no points at all!  Score!  I was able to print up all the pictures from our photo shoot with that!  Then, I was able to use 300 or so points (which would amount to about 30 12-packs of coke) to create a photo book that is normally $24.99.  Then, I decided to google "snapfish free shipping code" and found the code SHIP30 which cancelled my entire shipping cost altogether!  So, that's how I saved the other $41.76.  Not too bad, huh?