The Five Types of Money-Saving Tools and Resources

Spending money online is easy: you just browse online catalogs, provide your credit card details and buy whatever you need or want. Luckily there are quite a few resources that help you save money as well.

This post overviews the 5 types of sites that you may want consider for learning to save money online:

1. Bargain Hunting Social Media Communities

Pros: Web 2.0 sites allow for the wealth of cool tools like ratings, voting and comments. This helps to easier spot great deals and leaves almost no room for manipulation (fake submissions and sponsored reviews) as the deals are shared and voted by real people.

Cons: Users may get really spontaneous when it comes to categorizing and tagging shared deals, so it may be hard to spot special offers in the niche you are interested in.

Example: Buxr.com (a heavily moderated, high-quality resource where coupons are submitted by users)

2. Coupon codes and deals blogs

Pros: Blogs (maintained by one or several authors) are more organized and up-to-a-point that user-generated resources. They have less updates and are thus easier to keep up with.

Cons: The above advantage can actually be the disadvantage at the same time: blog authors usually use one and the same source (or sources) where they find new deals, so they thus lack variety.

Example: Coupon lady (for female audience) and Coupon Dad (for male shoppers)

3. Freebie aggregators

Pros: These sites collect freebies around the web and list them for you to take advantage of them.

Cons: Is there actually anything really free under the sun?

Example: List Free Samples (a high-quality collection of completely legal free samples, printable coupons and more)

4. Coupon codes directories

Pros: These are usually run by the team of bargain hunters who collect the deals either manually or automatically.

The sites are usually really well-organized and complete.

Cons: It is hard to filter really good deals without knowing what other readers think about each deal.

Example: Cheap Stingy Bargains (one of the richest and most complete, daily updated coupon codes resource)

5. Coupon codes forums

Pros: Like social media communities, the forums are updated by the active community of enthusiastic bargain hunters.

Cons: These are hard to control, so often heavily spammed and manipulated by sellers promoting their products.

Example: The Coupon Cupboard (probably not the most active one but one of the most useful and targeted coupon code forums out there).

To sum up:

Which one(s) do you prefer?

This guest post was provided by Ann Smarty, a search blogger and social media enthusiast. Ann has recently started the community of guest bloggers: go ahead and join the beta testers!

Similar Posts:

• Finding Great Deals on the Internet and How to Avoid Buying Things You Don’t Need
• Take Couponing to the Next Level With Printable Coupons from the Web and Email
• The ABC’s of Personal Finance, Saving Money, and Investing on the Internet
• Guide to Finding Black Friday Deals Ahead of Time on the Internet

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Tagged as: bargain hunting, coupon codes, coupons, free samples, freebies, Saving Money

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