With this difficult economy that the whole world is trying to contend with, it’s no wonder penny-pinching has become a way of life. Online resources suggesting ways how to save money on this and that have become valuable tools for a lot of entities – individuals and businesses alike.
Then came the emergence of collective buying websites like Groupon, LivingSocial and a whole host of others. For a lot of people who aim to get the most bang for their buck, deal of the day is here to stay. But did you know there are smaller niche websites that can help you save money, too? Here are 5 of those sites:
1. Bitrix24.com
For a business to survive a competitive marketplace, communication among its employees is of paramount importance. Problem is, corporate intranets usually cost thousands of dollars, and most small businesses may not have enough operating budget to afford them.
Bitrix24 provides a solution to that problem. If your business has 12 employees or less, Bitrix24 offers a basic package that is absolutely free. Yes, you heard that right. The basic package is absolutely free. And the package comes with a fully functional CRM, activity streaming where every team member gets updates as events unfold, calendar, activity planner, sales funnel and a whole host of other features. If your company is comprised of more than 12 employees, the service costs just about $99 per month.
2. Logaster.com
Online or not, if it’s a business you’re running, you need a logo. Unfortunately, professional logo designers command a high price – hundreds of dollars at the very least. And even with crowdsourcing sites, getting the logo you desire may render you at least $100 poorer.
Logaster.com lets you create your logo free of charge, and with a $4.99 subscription per month, you get other valuable features like business cards, letterheads and envelopes.
3. PickyDomains.com
Some people think it odd to pay somebody to come up with a name for his company or a domain for his website. Then again, branding can make or break your business. What’s worse, with millions and millions of top-level domains registered already, coming up with a domain that hasn’t been registered yet may be harder than you think it is.
PickyDomains.com is a site of over 55,000 namer contributors. All a client needs to do is register, pay the required $50 downpayment for a domain, brand or name (or $75 for a slogan), specify his parameters, then wait for suggestions to start pouring in. If none of the suggestions are to his liking, he may ask for a refund.
4. JetRadar.com
Expedia, CheapFlights and Orbitz are just three of several niche sites that have changed the way the securing-cheap-air-fare game is played forever. If you’re a businessman constantly on the go or somebody who simply likes to travel, with JetRadar.com, you can search for tickets that are even cheaper.
Cheaper than cheap? How’s that for a cool deal? JetRadar.com is a meta search engine that searches through every travel agency, major flight site and through registers of 728 individual airlines. Some deals from airline companies are made known only through their own websites and not anywhere else to ensure traffic to their sites. JetRadar makes these deals publicly available.
If you’re a business owner, you want to know what your competitor is up to. With iSpionage, you get to manage client campaigns, save valuable time monitoring affiliates and paid search competition, manage through search engine gaps, view the ads your competitor is running and a whole lot more.
And instead of you collating all the information you need from various searches, iSpionage sends you e-mail alerts every time a competitor activity is detected. iSpionage subscription starts at $59 per month.
LifeHacks - How To Use Bitrix24.Com As A Free CRM, Intranet And Task Manager.
Entrepreneurism runs in Melody Hsieh’s blood. Her parents operated an auto parts factory in Taiwan, where she once worked at the age of 8.
“I learned early in life that hard work and smart work are the essential ingredients to running a successful business,” she said.
So after college in 2000, Hsieh decided to start a company, with family money, that sold scooters. By 2003, sales at her ASA Products surged to $3 million.
But in the next three years, annual sales quickly plummeted to $300,000. “My mistake was that I had no long-term strategy to build my brand,” she said. “I was just pursuing a hot trend, and not paying attention to competition, customer service or marketing.”
In 2006, she took a hiatus from her company and went back to school for her MBA. In late 2006, she relaunched a new product — Mobo Cruisers — a line of three-wheeled cruisers for kids and adults. “This time I applied what I learned in school about marketing, operations and research before I launched the brand,” said Hsieh.
Today, Mobo Cruisers is sold through Target and Toys “R” Us and expanding into Canada. Hsieh, who’s a new mom to her three-month-old son, said she’s busier than ever now. “Women can do it. It’s hard but you don’t have to give up one role for the other,” she said. “Have a routine that works for you and stick to it.”
[Via - CNNMoney, HT - Easy Money]
Crowdsourcing Startups - PickyDomains.com
How I Increased Sales 350% With Press-Releases
From Police Work To Sauerkraut - Tim Forrest Story
Bootstrapping 101: Tips to Build Your business with Limited Cash and Free Outside Help
From 0 To $30,000 A Month With Dropshipping
Niche Startups - LookMazing.com
Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You
Daily Advice Link - Free Logo Service
Imagine American Idol on Facebook. Yes, not on TV, but on Facebook. Further still, imagine American Idol without Jennifer Lopez, Randy Jackson and Steve Tyler, but just the American population spotting the next big singing sensation.
Impossible? Not quite.
Brett Marl of FameMe.Com is looking to up the game by bringing a contest like American Idol to the Facebook generation, more like turning an interactive TV show into an even more interactive, accessible website. If that sounds a lot like YouTube to you, consider this: 60 hours of video is uploaded into YouTube every minute of the day so that getting spotted in a crowd like that is like finding a needle in a haystack – but probably not if you’re a kitten or an adorable baby with a toothless grin.
FameMe is structured like a contest. The judges are people at home, sitting in front of their computers, with three chances to vote for their favorite performers dai ly. FameMe makes full use of existing social media, Facebook and probably Twitter in the future, for both contestants and supporters to campaign for votes.
Fame.Me is only four months old, but Marl and his team are confident the site will be the next big thing.
[HT - Unusual Business]
The Mom And Pop Business - Successful Parenting Startups To Watch
How I Increased Sales 350% With Press-Releases
From Police Work To Sauerkraut - Tim Forrest Story
Bootstrapping 101: Tips to Build Your business with Limited Cash and Free Outside Help
From 0 To $30,000 A Month With Dropshipping
Will HubSpot Rewrite The Rules Of Marketing?
Live And Learn - Google Documentaries
Book of the day - The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions
OK, so in Parts 1 and 2, I told the story of my first steps with PickyDomains.com – namely getting publicity from bloggers and news sites for free. The next step was to buy some publicity – namely blog reviews. Back then (let me remind you, it was 2007) quite a few get-paid-for-review services appeared. ReviewMe.com as particularly hot and PayPerPost.com was getting a lot of traction as well.
I opted for ReviewMe.Com. I quickly learned that most reviews would cost me anywhere between 80 and 150 dollars (that is, if I wanted reviews to appear on blogs with PageRank and readership – there has never been shortage of cheap junky made-for-SEO blogs, especially on PPP). This was a lot of money, and ReviewMe.Com was partly to blame – they paid only 50% of the money to bloggers and took the rest. For the record, the highest I paid for a review was $500. I am never doing it again.
The idea to cut the middleman out was obvious. I started using ‘pay per post’ sites only to find blogs that offered advertising and approached owners directly. This approach cut my costs of getting published in half. I tried haggling some more and then an interesting thing happened. One blogger told me that $30 that I was offering was too low, because it would take him an hour to actually write the review and his time was more valuable than that. So I offered him to provide a written review and he’d publish it for lower price, provided the approved it. It worked.
After that my approach to buying reviews for PickyDomains changed. I felt that I could justify $30 for getting by blog reviewed. If blogger asked for more, I’d inform him or her that that was outside my budget, but I could provide review myself, if the price was lowered. Later we started advertising the fact that PickyDomains would pay $30 for review right on the site – so now I don’t have to spend much time looking for bloggers, as they approach me.
Finally, I found a way to get PickyDomains advertised on blogs for free. Yes, ZERO. And it’s very simple. Guest posts. A lot of blogs accept guest posts. Quite a few actually advertise this fact and have guest blogging or write for us section on their blog. All you have to do is provide a unique (meaning not published anywhere else) well written content. Believe me, you won’t have much competition, because most guest post submissions are pure junk.
Here are a few examples of my guest posts:
http://regulargeek.com/2011/06/20/7-sites-to-help-crowdsource-your-web-work/
http://growmap.com/domain-name-ideas/
http://byterevel.com/2011/10/22/9-wacky-but-successful-website-ideas/
Why am I submitting guest posts in this format? Because it’s easy to publish your guest posts this way. If I was to offer PickyDomains overview as a guest post – it would surely get rejected. But by making a ‘list’ guest post is no longer about just PickyDomains. The second, more important reason, is the topic. Some blogs are about writing or blogging. Others are about tech startups. There are blogs about bootstrapping. Or branding. Or crowdsourcing. The list format lets you tailor guest post to each blog you are pitching your story to. Finally, when you make a list, link to your site looks natural, because you are linking to every site you mention. Usually links are allowed in the signature of the guest post and not in the body. With my approach, I NEVER had any issues getting my link where it mattered (nobody reads the signature).
At first I did both writing and pitching guest posts myself. It quickly became a time consuming affair, since I was writing a new post almost every day and it quickly became ‘old’. I was getting tired. So I started outsourcing (I REALLY recommend this site) first writing and then placing guest posts. Obviously, it was costing my money, so the true cost was no longer zero, but it did achieve an important goal – now several blogs write about PickyDomains every week with very little effort on my behalf.
That’s it for today, but more is coming. And if you have any questions or have a service that you’d like me to promote through guest posts with PickyDomains, use PickyDomains support form to contact me.
Bootstrapping 101: Tips to Build Your business with Limited Cash and Free Outside Help
From 0 To $30,000 A Month With Dropshipping
New Startup Pays Experts To Answer Questions
Does your site need hits? We’ve got them!
If you’re a journalist, a blogger, a web designer, an interpreter, an analyst or just about anyone involved in text processing, blocking scripts on webpages can be a real pain as they entail manually typing blocks of text on your word processor. Not only is this a time-consuming task, it can be extremely labor-intensive as well, especially if you’re not a touch typist or simply hate typing a lot.
Enter Screen OCR, an optical character recognition platform that is application-independent and works perfectly well with any Win32/Win 64 operating system. With Screen OCR, all you need to do is choose the correct selection mode, which can range from whole window selection, simple cursor capture, scrolling capture to rectangular selection, select the text you need to copy, and it’s instantly copied to the clipboard. Instead of typing the whole deal, in a matter of milliseconds, you’re good to go.
Screen OCR recognizes just about any form of text that you see on your screen with amazing accuracy, whether that be on a scanned page, a web page, within an image or a PDF file. And it doesn’t crash unexpectedly.
If you want to try it out, go to their website and download the application for a 21-day trial. The moment you decide it really works and want your own copy, they offer secure online ordering with a money-back guarantee.