How to Save Money on the Web: 3 Types of Subscription Tools

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There’s only one reason why we hate holidays: huge spending they entail.That’s the time when we are forced to shop a lot and one good way to save on holiday shopping is by tracking deals and special offers.

Luckily, the Internet brings us a lot of handy tools that make shopping smarter and more organized and saving easier and more effective. Let’s take a look at most handy ways to get updated of online deals and coupons:

1. Email Alerts on Money-Saving Updates

Email is by far my favorite tool to get updates on anything. The only thing to keep in mind here is that with too many automated updates it is too easy to get lost and miss an important one. So to avoid stuffing your email box with subscription notifications, let’s see how we can create a customized email alert notifying you of new deals and coupons.

Buxr is a user-contributed coupon codes and deals directory allowing to create a customized email alert to track the deals related to a specific product (type) or to a specific merchant or manufacturer.

To create an alert, go to “Alerts” tab that can be found in your profile and specify the following:

• The store name (choose “All” if you have no particular seller in mind);
• Type of a deal (product, coupon, sale or all);
• A key phrase (to track a specific item or a product group):

More handy tools that allow to create email alerts:

• Yotify
• FreeShipping.org;
• PriceGrabber.

2. Twitter Alerts on Money-Saving Updates

Twitter users talk about anything; if there’s a good deal, it is likely to be already tweeted. If you use a smart tool to track Twitter, you are likely to already know about the deal.

There are quite a few Twitter apps that make tracking easy. My personal favorite is Seesmic (that runs on Adobe AIR). Just follow these easy steps and you are basically done:

1. Configure Seesmic to notify you of new search results (go to Settings > Notifications and putting a tick next to “Notify about new search results“):

2. Search Twitter using Seesmic for something like this: [keyword coupon] and you are done – Seesmic will automatically save your search:

From now on (and until you delete the search), Seesmic will be updating you of relevant new results by little pop-up notifications coming to your desktop:

3. SMS Alerts on Money-Saving Updates

Trackle is a web-based tool that sends you SMS alerts of new deals. To set up an alert, you will need to follow two steps:

1. Enable mobile phone notifications: go to your settings, provide your phone number and confirm it by providing the code which was sent to you by SMS.

2. Create a “Tracklet“: go to “Shopping Catalog”, click Add next to “Trackle Coupons” line, then provide which type of coupons you want to track and check “Instant SMS” as an update method:

Any money saving tools to share? I’d love to hear of new tools I am not aware of.

The guest post is by Ann Smarty who has recently started a community for guest bloggers and is now looking for beta testers.