Let the shopping begin! According to Gallup, Americans are planning to spend more on Christmas gifts this year than last (and much more than they planned to spend in 2008-2009). I don’t care how much I’m spending, I like to get a deal. Great deals abound online; Amazon’s been running Black Friday deals all week. I’ll be tweeting out deals as I see them and posting links on my Facebook page so check in with me at either place for up-to-the-minute specials.
For those of you braving the mall traffic, or standing in line at Best Buy, first of all, my lazy hat’s off to you. I prefer to click my way to great savings. But while you’re mentally debating whether or not that ginormous flat screen TV is really a good deal, whip out your phone, scan the barcode and find out if it’s being sold for less somewhere else.
You’ll need an app, of course. There are dozens, but here are the ones I use most often:
1) ShopSavvy - scan the item’s bar code and it will return prices for both local stores and online
2) Amazon’s App - this app has a feature that allows you to scan a barcode and it will tell you the price on Amazon. You can add the product to your wish list, or buy it from your phone. And if you can’t find the barcode, or the store has it covered with their own price sticker (which happens more often than I like!), you can take a photo of the product and Amazon will use an image search to match the product. It’s pretty slick. Android version here.
And before you head out, you might want to plan your trip usingBlackFriday by DealNews. The app is chock full of ads (including some “leaked” ads) and has comparison shopping tools. (You can also visit the DealNews website which is a great resource for the best deals, by product or store.)
All right, so while you’re out and about, I’ll be chasing my toddler and some good deals from my laptop. Or my iPad. Or my phone. DO NOT LET ME BUY A KINDLE FIRE or anything else that connects to the Internet. Happy Shopping!
Are you one of the 59 million people who will be traveling this holiday season? We dug up some of our favorite useful tools to help you keep a peaceful pace this season.
For the Speed Demon
This is a free iPhone app that warns you of speed traps and traffic cameras, helping you avoid fines and points on your driver’s license.
For the Jet Set
Mobile application for the iPhone, Treo, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Great for Business and family travel, it can track itineraries and all related details for a trip.
Great travel-oriented social networking site
Capture Precious Moments
Stickam – Stream live videos of your vacation from your mobile phone.
Upload mobile photos and share them with all of your social networking sites.
Seth Godin warns us that the Internet is almost full, not in terms of physical space — that’s almost unlimited — but in terms of our mental capacity to keep up. It really is overwhelming at times. How do you read all your emails, much less keep up with the news you want to read?
I’m only halfway there, but one of the most helpful things I’ve done is set up an RSS reader. What’s an RSS reader? RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Your favorite websites and blogs (like this one) have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. This will let you know when there is a new post and give you a quick summary of it (you can then decide to click thru to the full post).
You need to subscribe to these feeds in some sort of a reader. It’s like the personalized My Yahoo or iGoogle pages, both of which use RSS feeds to populate your selected content. But the one I like and use is Google’s Reader. It has a list of my feeds down the left hand side. I click on one and get summaries of stories (or blog posts) in a reading pane — just like email. I scroll through and scan and click if I want to read more. To add a site to your reader, just look for the RSS or Atom XML button on a site. (Sometimes, I do a CTRL+F which is a “find” shortcut and type in “RSS” to find the feed button.) Once you click on that, it’ll ask you where you want to put the feed, and there is almost always an option to add it to your Google Reader.
It’s simple once you get the hang of it. If you try it and need help, just shoot me a note and I’ll help you out.
One more thing: I often read news on my phone when I’m in waiting rooms or standing in lines. You can pull up your Google reader on most mobile phones and it optimizes the content for mobile viewing. That’s another tool I use to keep up with what’s going on and maximize my time a bit.
We’ve blogged previously about Google’s free text information system (send a text message to GOOGLE and get info back on everything from business phone numbers to movie listings to local weather), but have been remiss in letting readers know about Google’s foray into free telephone directory listings.
It works like dialing 411, only it’s free, every single time. You have your choice of being connected directly to the business, or receiving a text message with the info. They’ll even send a map to your phone if you like.
Next time you’re looking for a phone number, save yourself time and money by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 instead. (That’s 1-800-466-4411.)
A warm welcome to all the folks who braved the cold weather to hear me speak at today’s Dekalb County Brown Bag Luncheon. I met many entrepreneurs — from start-ups to seasoned pros — and was impressed with the talent and commitment they exhibited. Best of luck to all of you with your business ventures. We hope to see you back here on the blog from time to time. As promised, here is a listing of the web sites we discussed today:
We often recommend RedEnvelope.com for last-minute client gifts. If you’re looking for great holiday or end-of-year gifts, we just found a code for 15% off at Red Envelope. Just type in this code at check-out: BDEAL15. It expires 12/31/07. Happy Shopping!
I’m speaking at the Atlanta Business League’s annual “Super Tuesday” event 9/25. I’ve promised to post a list of the web sites I referenced during my talk. The topic is technology to grow and manage your business. I’ve broken the links into tools we use on the marketing side and tools we use on the operations side. Hope you all find this helpful. Regular readers of our blog will recognize some of these as we’ve blogged on their usefulness before!
Marketing Tools
•E-mail management and marketing: –www.ConstantContact.com •Polls/customer surveys: –www.SurveyMonkey.com •Cheap photos for marketing pieces (coupla’ bucks a piece): –www.iStockPhoto.com •Full-color printing: –www.PrintingForLess.com (ask for the Red Team) •Quick, cheap printing (quality not great): –www.OvernightPrints.com •Fun, quirky printing: –www.Moo.com •Shirts, tote bags with your logo (small quantity): –http://ocs.landsend.com/corpsales •Edible greeting cards: –www.ediblesinc.com •Custom cookies: –www.LadyFortunes.com •Chocolate business cards: –http://schottchocolateimages.com/ •Last-minute gift ideas: –www.RedEnvelope.com •Business networking: –www.LinkedIn.com •Social networking (find relevant groups): –www.Facebook.com –www.Ning.com –http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ga/atlanta/ (MeetUp Atlanta)
This site won’t win any design awards, but if you’re looking for serious insider help getting the best hotel rates, you won’t care what the site looks like. My hubby and I are planning a trip to NYC for our anniversary and I was coming up short with my usual research; the room rates in NY right now are sky high. Googling away, I found this site called BetterBidding.com. If you like to use Hotwire (and I do), they have all kinds of cheat sheets to help you figure out which hotels match up with your Hotwire search results. You can then go check those hotels out on TripAdvisor or another review engine and see if it’s a decent place. And if you still can’t figure it out, post a request for help on the boards and you’ll get very useful tips, rates, and links. It’s like having a travel agent who really knows how to “game the system.” Be sure and use the links they provide you; this guy makes his money through the referrals.
Need to create a PDF file but don’t want to pay for the full version of Acrobat? Not to worry. The kind folks at Mashable have put together a list of free tools you can use. I downloaded PDF 995 and it’s working great for me. There is a slightly annoying box that pops up when you create a PDF that asks if you want to sign up for the paid version but it’s easy enough to get rid of.
Sometimes, it’s frustrating to get nothing but Voice Mail Jails when calling a company. Worth bookmarking, this tool gives you the numbers and prompts to get to a real person. Hope this makes your life easier!
We're the brains behind New Thought Marketing, a consulting firm based in Atlanta. When it comes to marketing, we know how to push the envelope and we know when to keep it simple. If you need assistance in strategic thinking, contact us. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy our blog.
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