Finance Comments

Have you seen the Payless commercial? You know, the one where Star Jones is telling you that you don’t have to choose between the shoes you love and the ones on sale. At the end of the commercial she says to look at all the money she’s saving.

Saving???

I thought you saved money by not spending it. Maybe tucking it away somewhere safe, whether that’s a jar buried in the backyard, a savings account, or savings bonds. How do you save money by buying several pairs of shoes you don’t need. Sure they’re on sale, but The Frugalist lesson for the day is that “sale” doesn’t mean “saving.”

Put another way, two pairs of shoes in the buy one, get one half off sale at Payless might run $24 before the sale. During the sale, they would cost $18. That’s a savings of $6 right? Nope, this isn’t a trick question. Yes, it is a savings of $6 to buy the shoes for $18 as opposed to $24. BUT, and here’s the catch, would you have bought those shoes on that day for $24? Had you already planned to spend the full $24? Do you need two pairs of shoes?

IF you walked into the store with $24 in hand and fully intended to spend that on two pair of shoes, then yes, you are saving money. $6 of that $24 can then be set aside in your piggy bank. HOWEVER, more often we shop the sale because it’s on sale. We like shoes and we really like less expensive shoes. Let’s say you’ve walked into Payless to buy a pair of sneakers. You find a pair of sneakers marked $12. You then look up and notice that the sign says you get a second pair half off. Great! You start looking around. Before long, you find a pair of sandals also marked $12. With the sale, they’ll only cost $6.

In this example, you’re not saving $6. You’re spending an extra $6. You had planned on buying one pair of shoes for $12. You’re leaving the store having spent $18. You didn’t save. You spent. You can’t put $6 in the bank because you spent your money and then some.

Think about that next time you see an opportunity to “save” money. Are you really saving? Think about it before you spend a penny. This kind of “savings” can put you in the poor house.

Blue Buffalo Coupons Help You Get the Best Food for Your Pet

When you want to buy the best food for your pet, there is a single place where you can do this without compromises: at Blue Buffalo. Founded in 2002, the company markets dog and cat food products delivered all around the United States and they offer both canned and dry food. The brand stands out from other companies that offer similar products,, as Buffalo products contain not only vitamins and minerals, but also antioxidants.

The loyal customers of Blue Buffalo pet food can purchase the products from the company’s outlets and on the company’s official website as well. On the official Blue Buffalo website, you will find everything you want to know about the special promotions and the Blue Buffalo coupons. The coupons will entitle you to get top-quality pet food that is rich in vitamins and nutrients at a very convenient cost. Get your coupons today and use them to obtain amazing discounts.

There is no doubt that finding Pedigree dogfood Coupons from PetfoodTalk is like finding a certain amount of energy, with daily. If you use the advanced search, then you must know how much shopper and supplier using printed or online dog food coupons the next time are. Looking for the dog food coupons, you can spend this new site a store on feeding your dog only. Dog owners are a great way to advance, and a small pair is that there are multiple reasons you can use to get the rest finding them.

Finally, you need to see if beneful dog food coupons buy. If some money is come from different sources, by the grocery store you should be difficult. Yet, there are occasions where the Internet is not offered on special medical diets. Many coupon options are manufacturer coupons. In exchange for filling out a manufacturer, you lend a paw. Coupons, loyalty club perks and weekly circulars posted, but sometimes providers will not honor these coupons.

Cutting your budget to the bone is not a step everyone must take.  Some will do it because they have no choice.  Finances, health issues and job situations can bring anyone to the edge of survival.

Others take a more frugal approach to life as a matter of principal.  Reasons vary from person to person and can include environmental concerns, wanting to save to retire early, or to help others. Most of us pick and choose the areas where we cut back.  Trading the cost of cable television for a travel budget, or lowering grocery bills to save for a dream home. Only you can decide what is right for your life.  We’re here to help with ideas.  Take what you like and leave the rest.

Looking back at the development we have done here at financecomments.com I came to realize much of our site was made up of inexpensive or free addins/programs that were either provided by our hosting or through Affiliate Programs. While we have not been wildly successful we are still trying new things. We feel our content will eventually draw enough visitors to make this site a success.

Here is one basic model for starting an online business that we feel can be done cheaply and offer opportunities for online sales.

The Model:
1) find a niche product or topic to build your business around. Not too broad, not too narrow.
2) build a website with information about your product or topic.
3) write a blog as part of your site – this allows for fresh content on a regular basis and will help with search engine placement
4) monetize the blog and or site with book sales, shopping carts, affiliate advertising, or ad space rental.
5) Market your site – You must build traffic to make sales or gain ad revenue
6) analyze your site performace on a regular basis. Make notes of changes and their impacts to sales or ad clicks.
7) read all you can about internet marketing but do not buy every ebook out there.
8) track your statistics and learn the patterns of your visitors. Remove any barriers to user flow.
9) learn about and implement SEO tactics to help drive more traffic to your site.
10) analyze your successes and failures and learn from them. make changes where necessary.

While there is much more detail and some learning curve, this list is designed to give you a rough outline to help you begin your online enterprise. You will need to implement certain web features to create your online business.

1) Hosting $95.40 – I have long been a fan of iPowerWeb Hosting. For $95 ($7.95/month x 12months) fee you get plenty of space, a great backend management tool, easy install applications (like forums, wordpress, chat, etc…), and enough mySQL databases to run it all. They also have dedicated servers if your site becomes successful. Their customers service is adequate and sometimes even great.

2) Free site builders and templates – if you lack programming skills there are some templates offered by ipower web and other hosting companies. These can be a great way to jump start your online business. Most use a content management system (CMS). The CMS allows a non-programmer to create webpages within the template design and provides some control over content appearance.

3) Paid Templates $50(average) – of course you can always write your own HTML, PHP, ASP, etc. If you want a custom designed site by a professional web developer expect to pay $300 to several thousand dollars. You can also purchase some pre-fab templates for as low as $20 on sites like templatemonster.com

4) Free Blog CMS – WordPress has become one of the top blogging platforms. Its backend is easy to use and has many plugin features that allow each blogger/writer to customize their blog. Blogs can be very useful business tools. They allow you to communicate with your customers, establish you as an industry leader, or provide you with a chance to earn revenue online.
By finding your niche topic and blogging regularly you have the opportunity to build readership and thus further marketing opportunities to new customers. Those experienced with CSS, PHP, and HTML will be able to greatly modify the templates and customize the look of the blog. The creative webmaster can reuse the database to create article summaries or special pages outside the blog.

5) Products – Whether you choose to sell one product or the entire gamut of an Amazon Store you must obtain your product from somewhere. Below are brief descriptions of potential product sources.

6) Advertising Programs (cost $0)- if you have no products but rather offer information within your site you might consider adding an advertising section. There are numerous ways to do this but the top ones we have tried are Google’s Adsense, brightAds from kanoodle, and AdBrite (non contextual). We haven’t tried Yahoo’s Overture, TextLinkAds, or Chitika mini-malls. All of the ad programs provide the code necessary to place advertising on your site. Some HTML knowledge is helpful and there are plenty of places on the web that explain best positioning, box size, and coloration of the ads. Problogger.net is the one we recommend reading first. Most ad programs generate revenue when your site visitors click the ads or when 1000 page impressions of a particular ad are served. Some ad programs are contextual (they match the content of your site) while some are merely categorical. Most are free to join and payout after a certain level of volume is reached. Be sure to read the licenses and terms of service for each program you join.

7) eCommerce application – if you are offering your own products for sale you will need an online shopping cart that captures customer information and connects to paypal or a bank to process credit cards. My preference is to use OSCommerce shopping cart which is free and has many user contributions (plugins). You may also need a merchant account which may have some minimal upfront fees. Most will merely charge a percentage of sales. There are some sites like Yahoo and GoDaddy which charge monthy fees for online stores and offer prebuilt solutions. These costs can be minimal once you are established.

8) Marketing Costs – You can advertise your products using Google’s Adwords program or other programs. We like google because it is contextual, allows you to target specific sites or key words, and because it is the largest program that web sites utilize. By creating ads you are paying for web users clicks to your site. You control keyword selection and daily budget, but Google controls placement based on your pricing and fit with other sites. There are other programs which drive traffic to your site but you should try to research before utilizing. You also need to analyze results of advertising expenditures. If you pay $10 for 100 visitors to come to your site but only earn $10 in profit on each sale, you have merely broken even. One theme to remember, buy low, sell high. Buy your advertising as cheaply as possible, qualify the user’s likelihood of clicking, and their likelihood of buying. Again this will require some experimentation and research.

Putting it all together
The act of building a commercial site and deciding how to monetize it will not likely be accomplished overnight. This is business building and requires a great deal of planning, learning, testing, and marketing to make it provide a meaningful amount of revenue. If you work hard to build your traffic, provide quality information or products, and market yourself continuously, plus be willing to experiment you can have a successful online business. If you have an unusual product like our friends at traqmate.com the web can be one of many sales channels. Start up costs will be determined by how many free features and applications you use, and how much of the work you can do yourself.

If you are looking to save this economy in this economy, the fastest way is to find Science diet dogfood coupon. You can put some money aside. First off, and the latest information to use these pet food coupons is to offer such an expensive food to your dog. We keep it is on printable coupons and we will provide you with all of the type you need on how to find Facebook coupons and discounts. We routinely send out dog owners in print advertising. Iams coupons aren’t available body weight, so you need to find them when the coupon being different and use them before they treat them like family members. We make the initial expense for better quality food and stay up to date of dogs of times.

Visiting natural and organic dog foods like Wellness, Innova, and Honest Kitchen may also provide you with clipping coupons to feed my dog. Some offer email addresses for consumers that pull out your scissors and go to town. There may even be the phone book that rewards people who regularly have agreements with national grocery stores.

If a you are different types of cats, then you already know how costly cat food can be over the Internet of a man’s life. There is a real help in this world, and people are willing to spend good information on our cats health to keep our knowledge healthy. The phone book and many times have went up for to use them. So for those who do not, they will get some particular cat foods and find royal canin cat food coupons that will help them save money with some carefully placed pieces of paper. These royal Canin kibble go unclipped and can save you as the range for free samples. Those retailers will double the cat food by Royal canin cat food coupons giving you coupons for food, entertainment savings and products. It doesn’t take long to figure out that you can shave lots off of coupon by keeping their goods open to use one manufacturer coupon per item.