Site Review Blog

If you are even remotely like me, you shop for the best deal you can get.  One of the ways to get a great deal is by using coupons. The Keep Ca$h site is a great place to find online coupons.  A lot of the bigger Online stores often provide Coupon Codes as an incentive to get people to shop with them.  Coupons can be for all sorts of Items and for all sorts of amounts.  I must admit I didn’t know that you could find things like 20% off Plus free shipping codes.  I just picked this as an example from one of the current offers on the front page!

Of course, when buying some big ticket Items, a coupon could save you a small fortune.  Another current offer will get you $1000 - Yes, $1000 off the price of a Plasma TV.  Are you convinced yet?  I just wish I got $1K off the price of My Plasma!  It is worth your while when considering any purchase to do a quick search for a coupon - it may save you afrom a few $$ to a lot of $$.

Now, the website is styled as web 2.0 - bold colours, big text, rounded corners, simple layout and easy to use.  If you have never used a coupon before, the help section is really good at explaining the what and how.  I think that too many sites that provide an online service forget that their visitors may not understand what they are offering or how to use it.  The Help and FAQ is well written and easy to understand. They get a big plus for this.

You can easily browse all of the deals available by store or use the search to find coupons for a particular item.  The search is fast and comprehensive.  Well, we just typed in “plasma” and got a list of a couple of pages to browse thru.  The search results are ordered by the date they were added under each store.  There were offers added today, so you can almost be guaranteed if you find an offer it will be valid.  If you just want to stay on top of deals, you can sign up and get a weekly newsletter with all the new deals in it.

Visit www.keepcash.com

Ever need to get to a site from work or school and you were blocked? Well, you might want to take a look at browseSneaky.com  It is a web-based proxy that is super easy to use.  Using a proxy also means that your IP will never show up in the logs on the site you visit which further protects you online.  They have 2 different proxy scpts running from their server a cgi and php version.  When browsing, we found a couple of sites that just didn’t work, so we switched from php to cgi and kept going.

A site such as this is pretty simple - just type in the address of the real site you want to go to and it does it all for you.  You even get a little proxy bar at the top of every page you go to.  Here, you can set some options that help you further protect your privacy - such as blocking cookies and ads.

Visit www.browsesneaky.com

Are you like me and hate trying to type out an SMS from your phone? I thought so! Make it easy on yourself and send your SMS’s From the Web at Text SMS Sender for free. This site will let you send an SMS to several Mobile networks by just filling in a web form - It doesn’t get much easier than this. The site is pretty simple, but it does make sending your SMS easy and fast - much faster than trying to use your telephone keypad to type out a message. Start sending out your SMS messages the easy way now.

Visit www.textsmssender.com

Regular Readers of this blog may or may not realise that most posts are paid reviews of websites.  In order to maintain our Integrity as to what we are doing, we have made use of the services of Disclosure Policy website.  This site is set up in such a way to make it easy for blog owners to generate a Disclosure Policy.

The site was super easy to use to create a policy and it only took a few minutes.  By simply answering a series of questions I was able to generate a policy in just a few minutes.  Anyone who runs a blog that accpets any sort of sponsorship should consider doing the same thing.

Here is the Policy as-generated for us when we answered the questions.

Our Disclosure Policy

This policy is valid from 21 November 2006
 This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

 The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

 The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

 This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.
To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

Ever get a link to a site in your email that didn’t work because it was spread across 2 lines and broken? I sure have! Next time, before you go and send a link in an email why not shrink it into a short url before sending it.  Another use for this sort of service is when you want to post a link into a forum.  Simply create the Short URL first, and then copy the BBCode of the Short URL and post your form message!

The Short URL service offered by tiniuri is easy to use, provides the codes of the short URL, allows you to emal yourself a copy of the codes for later use.  Another nice feature is the ability to select to mask the url of the site you are going to.  Anyone who wants to “hide” an affiliate link within an email or web page might make use of such a service.

The Website is easy to use, the tools are on the front page so you don’t have to go looking for them. A simple site that does what it says.

The other thing about the site is that they sell the scripts that allows them to create the short url’s.  You can purchase a copy and create your own short url service, but it is probably more useful for someone who wants to use affiliate links in their own website and make the links look like they are part of the same site!

Visit tiniuri.com

Nearly everyone who owns a website or runs a web business is looking for the best possible way to either promote thier products or to profit from their website. I want to introduce you to something that you may or may not have heard of. pre sell pages or HMP (Hosted Marketing Pages) is a concept that has been around for a couple of years and is probably the most under-utilised method of marketing on the Internet today.

A HMP or presell page is where you get a marketing page for your product or service Hosted as a page on Somebody else’s website. It is done in such a way so that it looks just like another content page on their website.  Not only is it a hosted page, but they usually have some very well placed deep links into your site.  Now there are a lot of reasons why someone might want to do this, but of course the major ones include things like getting a page on what is considered to be an Authority site, such as on an .edu domain.  A page on say a University site that talks about your site gives a lot of credibility to you and that is the edge that presell pages offers over other methods of marketing.  Of course, the other edge is that the links to you are embedded within unique content about you as well.

Now we know a little about, lets look at the how.  In order for this to work, the best way is to use a broker type service such as Presell Page Man. They act as a broker putting sellers and buyers in touch with each other, and generally have an inventory of sites that will host your HMP.

If you have ever tried to get .edu text links you would know how hard it is, but if you want to go even better and have some content hosting on .edu that gives great credence to you and will certainly blast the competition away, then this concept might be what you are looking for.  I can really only begin to explain the concepts here, but if you want more info about how HMP pages can help you or even more detail as to what they are then check out the FAQ

Now, for a webmaster who owns an established content or Authoritive site on a subject this might be a way for you to earn some extra income. As a webmaster, you are always looking for unique content right? why not have someone pay you to host their content!  There are a few “rules” that keep the whole HMP concept alive and working, and that is of course that a webmaster should NEVER disclose the fact that he has HMP pages as part of his (or her) website.  This adds to the credibility of both your site as well as to the Buyers site.  A correctly written HMP will look exactly like any other content page on your site, right down to the internal mavigation structure (and maybe even the contextual advertising block you have on all of your content pages).  The secret is to not let it resemble and “infomercial” in any way, shape or form, it is just part of your site.

Visit www.presellpageman.com

Introducing NextGenerationHost.com - They are a new web hosting company.  They offer both Shared and Reseller web hosting with Cpanel Control Panel.  The plans look reasonable for the prices they are charging. They have some great specials - on some accounts they are including Domain registration.  What sets NextGeneration apart from their competition is that they offer additional services that might be of benefit to new webmasters.  From the same company you purchase your hosting, you can also purchase SEO or Search Engine Optimization Services.  You no longer have to go out and look for a SEO company, you can deal with someone you already know and trust to do this work for you.

They offer 24/7 support via email and telephone, and provide an uptime guarantee.  While a guarantee does not mean your website will always be online, it does give you peace of mind that they take availibility seriously.

If you are considering a new website and you want to spread your sites around, take a look at what a new hosting company might be able to offer you.

Visit nextgenerationhost.com