Three Great Tips: How to Use the Web to Save Money

Tweet

Please welcome Ann back to 3 Boys and a Dog!  She always brings us awesome information and this time is no different. ~Kelli

No matter how hard we work or how much money we manage to save, there always seems to be some special occasion turning up to try and separate us from our hard earned cash. Birthdays, dates, holidays, vacations, the list goes on and on. Often what should be a fun, worry free time turns into a stressful nightmare as you carefully try and arrange your limited budget around the supposedly happy event.

It doesn’t have to be that way. With the power of the internet you can find great deals for saving money on events happening both locally and across the entire world. Whether your trying to get ready for Christmas, or if your simply looking for a good deal on a nice night out, by keeping track of electronic coupons and online deals you can find yourself saving a great deal of money, and having an awesome time in the process.

You don’t need to be a tech geek in order to find these deals, just follow these simple tips and you’ll be able to find great money off vouchers online with very little problem:

1. Set Up Money-Saving Alerts for Your Email

Nearly everyone has an email address, with most people checking their email at least several times a day to see if they have received any interesting messages. Setting up alerts from money saving website so that they come through to your email address is really easy. What’s not so easy is making sure you don’t get deluged by an ever increasing amount of spam.

To make sure you only get relevant offers sent through to your email, you first have to find a coupon website that you can trust, and then you should set up a custom alerts list so that you only get sent information on products or services that you’re actually interested in.

One of the best places for finding great money saving deals online is FreeShipping.org, a free shipping deal directory that has new coupons being shared constantly throughout the day.

Setting up email alerts at the site couldn’t be easier, all you have to do is register as a member and then follow these simple steps:

• In the main menus click “My Favorite Coupons”
• Choose the stores that you want to see coupons for.
• Enjoy instant updates as soon as the stores you selected have a new free shipping deal.

2. Using Twitter Alerts to Find Out About Money-Saving Deals

One of the great things about Twitter is that people use it to talk about everything. So logic dictates that if there is a really good deal going around someone on Twitter will be talking about. With the use of software designed specifically to track what’s being talked about on Twitter, finding those deals is no problem at all.

Personally my favorite Twitter tool is Seesmic, it’s free to use and lets you track multiple conversations across both Twitter and Facebook completely hassle free. You will need to have Adobe AIR installed in order to use it, but that’s free as well so it isn’t really an issue.

Assuming you have already installed Adobe AIR and Seesmic, just follow these simple steps in order to set up alerts for when people are talking about deals your interested in via Twitter:

• Run Seesmic and go to your settings panel, from there click on Notifications and click on the box labeled Enable Notifications so that a tick appears. Do the same for the boxes next to the line “notify about new search results”.
• Now just search Twitter (via Seesmic) for a phrase like “laptop coupon” (replacing laptop with whatever product you are looking for, and potentially replacing coupon with words like discount, sale or free). Seesmic will save the search term and provide you relevant alerts until you tell it to stop.

That is all you have to do to make sure you get the latest up to date information live from Twitter, you will be amazed just how many great deals you can find this way. Whenever a user tweets a phrase with your selected words present, you will receive a pop-up notification of the event on your screen (as long as Seemic is running), letting you investigate the information at your own leisure.

You can use Seesmic to track your favorites deal sources and their official Twitter accounts as well. My personal favorites are:

• Promo Codes (US only)
• Coupon Sherpa

3. Setting Up Text Message Alerts Regarding Money-Saving Deals

If you want to get the latest information on local deals sent through to your phone, Trackle is probably the best system for keeping an eye on the brands you love.

It’s really easy to use, just follow these simple steps and you will be good to go:

• Register for an account at Trackle
• Once logged into your Trackle account go to your setting page and type in your mobile phone number. Click enable mobile phone notifications and they will send a code through to your phone, confirm the code so the system knows they have got the right number.
• Next you need to create a “Tracklet”, to do this simply click on “Shopping Catalog”, then click on Add next to the line which reads “Trackle Coupons”. Fill in the information regarding what kind of coupons you want (again be specific, you can always set up more alerts later), and then make sure you have ticked the “Instant SMS” notification option from the sidebar on the right.

With that done you should now get real-time notifications sent straight through to your phone.

I hope these tips prove to be useful. If you have any other sites or tools worth mentioning for saving people money online I would love to hear from you.

Ann Smarty is an SEO and Internet marketing blogger running SEOsmarty blog and founder of MyBlogGuest the free community dedicated to guest posting exchange.

Tweet