You don’t need to get a job in world, or buy Linden using your Paypal or credit card to look good in Second Life. Here are a few tips & tricks to finding decent freebies in Second Life & on the Marketplace.

• Blogs: If you do a quick google search you can find tons of blogs that talk about Second Life. A lot of them are fashion blogs, or freebie blogs, where they post pictures and tell you where they found them.
• Hunts: A hunt is when a group of stores get together, decide on a theme (ex: Halloween, Spring, etc) and make gifts to give out to people who ‘hunt’ (basically you just wander around the store looking for a certain item which contains the gift) for them in each store that’s participating. Many hunts are free, and you can find out about current hunts here.
• Fairs: There is usually some sort of fair going on somewhere in Second Life and some of them give out gifts to those who attend. There are fairs all about Hair, fairs about Skins, and there are fairs that support real life charities & causes. An example of one going on right now is the Fantasy Faire, which is supporting Relay for Life.
• Group Gifts: Many store groups give out gifts to those who are in their group.  Some of the groups do have a fee to join, but there are many groups that are free.

Also if you are still under 30 days, FabFree has a great list of stores that give things away to new users so I suggest checking it out.

Marketplace Tips

The Marketplace can be a great place to find freebies, but it can be a bit confusing when you’re new. Using keywords like free, freebie, gift are what will help the most here. If you have a few linden, you also search ‘dollarbies’ which are items that usually cost 1L.

• Don’t be too specific if you’re using keywords. Typing ‘cute tan heels with pink flowers’ is very, very unlikely to yield any results. Try to focus one just one or two keywords.
• You can filter out some demo’s by typing ‘NOT demo’ after your keywords. Ex: tan heels NOT demo
• Once you’ve searched, you can see some search filters on the left side. Searching by price is very handy, you can even set your own (0L to 1L is ideal since you can’t just search for 0L items).
• Under the Search bar there is a Sort option that allows you to sort the search results, selecting ‘Price: Low to High’ will show the lower priced items first.