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.

5. iSpionage.com

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.

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http://www.mobocruiser.com/

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]

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http://www.fame.me/

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.

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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.

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http://www.screenocr.com

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.

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http://www.eworky.com/

If you’re normal as normal can be and you have an extra room or space in your company, chances are all you have in there are empty boxes or broken equipment. How about renting it out to rake in some extra cash?

In a different scenario, imagine yourself a small business owner needing to conduct a meeting in a place with special equipment and/or infrastructure beyond your budget, or a freelancer in need of a temporary workspace. How does booking a workspace on a daily, weekly, monthly basis when you need it, where you need it at a price you can afford sound?

This, basically, is the idea behind startup eWorky - to function as collaborative search platform for people on the lookout for workspace. eWorky has a big community of companies offering diverse types of workspace for various types of professions.

Finding available workspace with eWorky is less complicated than online car reservation. All you need to do is sign up, log into your account and search for the space you need in your area. If you’re looking to rent in another city, simply scroll to your city of choice and browse through available listings. As soon as you find what you need, book and pay for the workspace online.

If you’re a property manager wishing to provide workspace, eWorky allows you to advertise your place for free. Make sure to be descriptive of your property. And that should include its size, furniture available, amenities such as Wi-Fi, how to access the space, vacancies and promos for customers with multiple and/or long-term bookings. Once a customer agrees with your specified terms, payment is deposited directly to your account. Did you like our eWorky.Com revew?

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It’s hard to stay focused in the digital world, but Signal founders Jeff Judge and Chris Watland have turned their SMS-marketing startup into a web success story by emphasizing the fundamentals. The duo got in on the ground floor of the exploding text-marketing industry, building an easy-to-use platform for firms managing SMS campaigns. Today Signal has evolved into a cross-channel marketing platform for managing text campaigns, e-mail marketing, social media and even coupons and sweepstakes from a single cloud-based account.

And they did it without a dime from outside investors.

The Chicago-based company pulls in $2.7 million in annual revenue and has run more than 200,000 campaigns for more than 1,000 clients, including Redbox and Sears, since its launch in 2006. And Signal remains lean, running a 15-person office.

From Real Estate to SMS
Watland and Judge met back in ‘06. Watland had been working in public accounting for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Judge started out as a management consultant before a stint at web travel firm Orbitz, where he worked his way up from software engineer to director of technology. Both had ambitions for making it on their own, and they struck up a friendship pitching business ideas back and forth.

Watland and Judge were intrigued by the text alerts some local bars were sending about drink specials. Their curiosity led to what they saw as an opening in the mobile-marketing space, which was just beginning to take off. “There was no self-service text messaging where a business could come out and get going right away,” Judge says.

Within a month of hatching the idea, the two were working on the new concept full-time. Judge was putting his software skills to use building a basic SMS-messaging platform, while Watland hit the pavement to gather intelligence on potential customers and what they wanted from a text-messaging service.

Their goal: Build a one-stop shop to manage and track digital campaigns. Judge estimates there were already about 200 SMS-marketing firms in the space, but no clear leader and very few offering the kind of simplicity firms were seeking.

“The industry, at least in terms of text marketing, was a lot of garbage content. Pay-to-vote, pay for wallpaper or ringtones. We started to get calls from people who said, ‘If you could only pair this with e-mail,’” Judge says. “All the signs started to point to building a central platform.”

Going it Alone
Watland and Judge put up $35,000 apiece from personal savings and secured $100,000 in operating credit, which they’ve since repaid. They decided very early in the process not to go after outside investments, feeling stymied by the venture capital Kabuki dance.

“At least in Chicago, it seemed like a lot of investors who backed startup companies were interested in obvious opportunities,” Judge says. “They were interested in us, but it seemed like we had to spend a lot of time piecing together who we were and why we were unique. Over time it felt like those conversations were a brick wall.”

So Watland and Judge decided to focus on collecting customers instead of investors. Their first customers came from an old-fashioned referral from the business next door, followed by a few more local Chicago companies. Then more clients started to come in from AdWords, shoe-leather networking and social media.

In a lot of ways, Watland says, their timing was dead on. Some of Signal’s first customers were skeptical about text marketing, but the idea wasn’t completely alien, with shows like American Idol popularizing text campaigns. “I think we latched onto this pretty quickly: You want to be new and innovative, but you don’t want to be too new [that] people aren’t familiar with it,” he says.

The do-it-yourself funding approach gave the business an edge it might have been missing with a fat bank account. “We’ve been scrappy and lean since day one,” Judge says. “We think bootstrapping is important. It’s a hell of a lot harder, but it forces you to really think through your decisions, take quick action and learn from mistakes. It’s different when you have to focus on where money comes from rather than having a big cushion in the bank.”

That’s not to say living on the edge inspired flawless business thinking. A brief foray into building mobile smartphone apps for clients almost proved costly. “Logically it made sense at the time. Anyone can build an app, but it’s a one-time enterprise, unlike our core product, text messaging, which is continuous,” Watland says, noting that the experience reemphasized the value of sticking to their priorities. “It’s about focusing on the core and shutting down other things that aren’t core to the business.”

SMS for Everyone
For now, the focus at Signal is on continuing to refine its central service: a cross-channel marketing platform.

And while the company has so far worked mainly with larger firms, it recently debuted a freemium model for small businesses.

Matt Kubinski is the director of promotions and marketing for Lodge Management, one of Signal’s earliest customers. Lodge, which manages 12 bars in the downtown Chicago area, uses the service to push promotions such as waiving cover charges for text subscribers.

“It’s a very large part of what we do,” Kubinski says. “We do a vocals competition at one of the bars–a grandiose karaoke contest that we kind of set up in the style of American Idol–and people vote by texting on their phones. It’s a unique, fun way to get people involved.”

Tools of Engagement
Four social media management tools to get more buzz for your buck

HootSuite
HootSuite lets users manage multiple networks, schedule messages, develop custom analytics reports and more. HootSuite is free, but certain features, including reports, work on a points system. Users must upgrade from a free account to have access to all the site’s features.

Sprout Social
With Sprout Social, users can organize multiple accounts and multiple identities in one place, schedule messages and measure success through reports. The interface is among the sharpest around. Sprout Social also has some cool tools for discovering new people to follow and engage. Packages range from $9 per month to $899 per month.

Actionly
Actionly is a paid social media monitoring tool that gives users the ability to create custom searches from which to pull data, track ROI and measure post-click conversations. It also facilitates the management of multiple social media accounts from its dashboard. Best of all, Actionly integrates with Google Analytics. Plans are $50, $100 and $400 per month.

NutshellMail
NutshellMail from Constant Contact tracks users’ social media presence on a number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, foursquare and YouTube, and delivers a summary via e-mail. The tool is free, and therefore great for managing brands on a budget.

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http://scan.me/

Before Apple released the iPad 2, Garrett Gee made a lucky guess. “I knew it was going to have a camera, and because of that I just imagined that there would be a blog post or something similar on the top 10 new apps for the iPad 2,” he says.

Gee wasn’t just the average college student geeking out. A student at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, he is one of the founders of Scan (scan.me), which allows iPad, iPhone and Droid users to scan quick-response (QR) codes.

Gee’s push to get his hands on the iPad 2 and get it to his iOS developer was motivated by his desire for Scan to be the first QR-scanner app available specifically for the device–thereby earning a spot on those top 10 lists. Thanks to two sleepless nights, he succeeded.

Gee’s path from student to entrepreneur started in 2009, when he received a smartphone for Christmas. With that device, the then-freshman scanned his first QR code and realized there could be apps and software that were less clunky and easier to use. At a web-design conference, he met Twitter creative director Doug Bowman, who encouraged him to pursue his idea.

Gee recruited classmates Kirk Ouimet and Ben Turley to help launch Scan in February 2011. The idea was to use simple online and mobile tools to give users a better option for scanning QR codes, and to offer a polished option for businesses that wanted to create those codes.

“There are many, many sites where you can go and create your own QR code,” Gee concedes. “Remember when Facebook and Twitter were first getting popular, and businesses large and small all hopped on and started creating Twitter accounts and Facebook pages? They didn’t really know how or why; they were just doing it because they thought it was important. It’s been the same story with QR codes. People see them popping up all over the place, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, we should probably use QR codes for our marketing.’”

Gee, Ouimet and Turley took second place in BYU’s business plan competition in April 2011–a status they parlayed into funding. After 16 trips to pitch to investors such as Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures and the co-owner of the Boston Celtics, they had $1.5 million. Gee waded through the offers while balancing school and travel as a forward on BYU’s semiprofessional soccer team, often taking conference calls in airport bathrooms along the way.

The team used that capital to build a platform and user base that earned Scan 10 million downloads in the first year. The actual scans derived from those downloads grew from 12 million to 21 million between September and October 2011. The next move is to develop a monetization plan. Today the software to read or create codes is free of charge; future options will include premium content and mobile-commerce templates.

Gee, now 25, is working toward graduating from BYU. For now, the dual student-CEO role is serving him well. “People relate to the student world quite well,” he says. “You could say I play the ‘student card’ quite often when I’m meeting with big companies. It definitely scores me empathy points.”

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http://apptopia.com/

These days, in the mobile world, mobile apps are big and getting bigger. Something, however, is amiss. Despite the continually advancing number of users who supposedly should be helping app developers pocket some cash they rightfully deserve for their ingenuity and hard work, such is not the case. Enter Apptopia, a new marketplace where mobile app ownership can be conveniently bought and sold, just like on eBay.

If you’re an app developer looking to profit from your creation, simply list your app for sale with Apptopia. For bidding to begin, explain what your app is about and pick the site category where it will be featured. If you’re a buyer, the company lets you own not just the app but also the code, its users and revenue. The average app normally sells for $7,500, and Apptopia takes a 15% cut off each sale.

According to one of the founders (Jo nathan Kay), Apptopia will be partnering with a company specializing in ratings and reviews, providing everyone with relatable user experience. Further, integration with platforms specializing in analytics, like Flurry and Localytics, will help provide buyers with additional data points. An app valuation tool is slated to become available soon as well.

Apptopia, if successful, hopes to build a platform that helps newcomer developers know the value of their work and avoid making the mistake of selling what they labored so hard for for just a portion of what it’s really worth.

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http://www.cooperstowncookie.com/

Cracker Jack, peanuts, hot dogs. It almost seems like ballpark food is more exciting than the game itself. And if Pati Grady has anything to do with it, we’ll soon be adding shortbread cookies to the list of iconic ballpark snacks.

In 2004, Grady searched online for a baseball cookie cutter to no avail. Improvising, she used a drinking glass to cut rounds out of dough made from her family’s shortbread recipe and used a crimping tool to make stitches.

Coincidentally, the cookies were the exact size of MLB regulation baseballs, and Grady sensed that she had the seed for a new business. She incorporated and named the company Cooperstown Cookie, in honor of her hometown and the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

In 2008, Cooperstown Cookie scored official licenses with Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame, doubling sales immediately. “It changed everything,” Grady said. “And with licenses, the world of wholesale opened up.”

Today, she supplies her treats to stadiums across the country, from Busch Stadium in St. Louis to Seattle’s Safeco Field. Grady also does a pretty brisk online business, selling cookies packaged in boxes and teams emblazoned with team logos.

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