Pinterest has a core demographic of users, women between the age of 25-44. This particular demographic is great for businesses who have beautiful products to sell, which is why we’re seeing more & more small businesses sign up to Pinterest. In this guide we’ll be giving you some handy tips & tricks to get the most out of Pinterest, as a user or as a small business trying to make Pinterest work for you.

Use The Pinterest Bookmarklet

The Pinterest bookmarklet makes it really easy to add images to your boards without having to submit them manually. Simply drag it to your bookmarks bar in your browser then click it when you want to add an images from a website. You’ll see something like this show:

Use Beautiful Images

Since Pinterest is a very visual website it’s important to ensure you’re always adding high quality content. This means using beautiful imagery, avoid adding small, grainy or poor quality photos as it may reduce your chances of getting new followers or your content repinned.

Tag/Mention Users In Posts

Pinterest utilises the @ symbol to mention other users in posts or comments (similar to how you do it on Facebook), just type @ followed by the name of the person you want to include in your post. This is a great way to get a conversation going between users & also meet new people through mentions from others.

Utilise Contributors

You can set up boards to allow contributions from users other than yourself, this can be a great way to build a community around a specific topic or give control to your fans/userbase for a competition or daily pin.

Use Hashtags

Add hashtags to your posts to help you find similar posts across other boards, for example you might decide to use the hastag #beautiful or #creative, or perhaps something related to a special event like #Christmas. These tags will make it easier for you & other users to find boards/pins that all have a similar theme – this should also improve the repinability of your boards.

See Pins From A Specific Site

If there’s a specific site that you love you can easily see all the items that have be pinned just by using the following URL: http://pinterest.com/source/thinng.com/

You can replace the URL after the source to the site you want to see the pins from. Easy!

Create A Daily Pin

Tumblr is a great way to get a daily feed of content that you love, Pinterest is a great way of doing the same – it also helps you build a following of users who appreciate your style. Create boards that you pin a new product or image to daily (i.e. beautiful images, vintage fashion or daily deals).

Don’t Just Promote Your Own Products

There’s nothing worse than seeing a user sign up then just constantly promote their own products (unless it’s a really well known brand). Make sure that in order to keep users interested in your pins that you have as much diversification as possible, use great content to build up your fan base then slowly seed out your own products to see how people respond.

Follow The Influential Users

Following influential users can be a great way to build up a fan base, repin their posts, comment on things & try to build that relationship so they might in turn repin some of your posts. A repin from a top user can easily add hundreds of followers to your account.

Use Descriptive Board Names

Due to Pinterest’ rise in popularity lots of sites are linking to the great content, this in turn is boosting the rankings in search engines. You can attract lots of additional traffic to your pins by giving them search engine friendly names.

For example if I was making a board around vintage clothing, with a little bit of research I can see what I should name it:

We can see there’s quite a bit of search volume around vintage dresses, vintage wedding dresses & jewelry. This might make us set up a few separate boards on Pinterest named: “Vintage Clothing”, “Vintage Wedding Dresses” & “Vintage Jewelry”

Repin Popular Content

Earlier we talked about following influential users & repinning their content, well not everyone that gets a popular pin is necessarily an influential user. That’s why it’s important to keep tabs on the top pins of the day then repinning them early, this can help you “ride the wave” of repins that happen on this particular content. In some cases, users will take an image & add it as their own to claim much of the glory. Whilst this is frowned upon, it’s a valid strategy from some pinners (as it is on Tumblr).

Leave Insightful Comments

Comments are the core way in which you interact with other Pinterest users, so make first impressions count. A good insightful comment can lead to someone checking out your content then following you.

Leverage Your Existing Facebook or Twitter Fans

When you first join Pinterest & add some boards, send a tweet out or a message on Facebook asking your users to follow you. This is a great way to get off to a good start. You can also set up automatic posting to your Facebook or Twitter timeline from within Pinterest:

Find Amazing Content To Pin

One of the biggest challenges you face as a new user on Pinterest is finding great content to pin, some of the best users on Pinterest have a clear methodology for finding the best content. We highly recommend checking out Tumblr, FFFound, some of the Pinterest variants like Thinng or The Fancy to get you started.

Create Coupons Just For Pinterest Users

If you run a popular brand or online store a great way to improve sales is to run exclusive coupons or deals just for Pinterest users. Create a separate board for all your promotions! Don’t forget your can add prices to your pins, just add the $ then the price in the description.

Use The Pinterest Follow Button

A great way to get more followers is to include the pinterest follow button in your blog sidebar, forum signature or email signature. You can get it here.

We’ve updated this popular post for 2012 with all of the newest hacks we’ve seen for Dropbox

Dropbox is an application for Windows, Mac & Linux that allows you to seamlessly & securely backup, store or share files between multiple locations.

Typical uses include sharing important files between home PC’s & laptops or having a secure online backup of all your important stuff.

Dropbox is free to use for up to 2GB of storage, the premium version ($199.99 per year) upgrades your storage to 100GB. You can also get up to 4.5GB of extra space if you test you the new experimental build of Dropbox for Photos.

In this post we’ll look past the basic features of Dropbox & delve into some of the more advanced ninja type things it can be used for.

Get 512MB Of Extra Space

Sign up for Dropbox, then visit this page. Simply connect dropbox to Facebook, Twitter, Tweet about Dropbox & then tell Dropbox one thing you love about them. Easy.

Portable Dropbox – Take It Anywhere

Take your Dropbox everywhere with DropboxPortableAHK. Simply install it to a USB stick then you’ll be able to use your Dropbox anywhere by just plugging it into a machine (i.e. Internet Cafe, Friends House & Work).

Start Bittorrent Downloads from Work

Some Bittorrent clients (uTorrent on PC & Transmission on Mac) allow automatic starting of .torrent files that have been added to a specific folder. Essentially this means you can make that folder a folder on your Dropbox (see below), in my case it’s D:\My Dropbox\Torrents

Provided that you leave your home computer on with your Torrent client running you can save torrent files to that folder (My Dropbox/Torrents) from any location (i.e. work) & the download will be waiting for you when you get home.

Use Dropbox as your Documents Folder

Most people use their Documents folder to store important information, yet many fail to make regular backups. Dropbox makes that very simple for you if you decide to use your Dropbox as your Documents folder.

In Windows Vista or 7 this is extremely easy to setup. Right click on your My Documents folder then select the Location tab, click on move & select your Dropbox folder. When you hit ok it’ll ask if you want to move all your files & folders to the new location also, click yes & you’re done.

Dropbox will now keep your My Documents folder in sync when you add & remove files. The beauty of this is that if you also have other PC’s or a laptop in the house you can use the same Dropbox configuration & share the My Documents folder across all of them.

Sync passwords with KeePass

If you’re an avid KeePass user you might find it frustrating to keep your Database on a USB key. KeePass is an extremely secure password safe with AES 256 bit encryption, that means that even if someone did get a hold of your database file the changes of them getting access is extremely slim.

You can use Dropbox to store your password safe and the key file (this file provides extra security). This means that you’ll have the same passwords on all the computers you have your Dropbox on.

Photo Backups

Dropbox has just released a new feature that allows you to upload all of your mobile phone photos to your personal Dropbox (via Wifi). This means you’ll never lose those important memories again.

iPhoto Backups

You can use Phoshare to backup your iPhoto Library to Dropbox automatically.

/Applications/Phoshare.app/Contents/*MacOS/Phoshare* -e . -d -k -u --size 1920 --iphoto "~/Pictures/iPhoto Library" --export "~/Dropbox/iPhoto Backup"

The command above (provided the folders match yours) will give you an output similar to this:

Multiple Dropbox Instances on OSX

If you have more than one Dropbox account (i.e. one for home & one for work) then it’s clear that you want to keep the files separate. Dropbox currently doesn’t allow you to run both instances on one user account. However, It’s possible to get OSX to run multiple Dropbox instances, there’s a cool app called DropboxEncore that allows you to have two separate instances running.

Multiple Dropbox Instances on Windows

You can also do the same on Windows, using this guide.

Get Files Airdropped to You

Airdropper is a 3rd party program that sync with Dropbox via the API, it allows users to send files directly to your Dropbox via a public URL. Great for competitions, musicians or for client projects.

Keep Firefox Profiles in sync across PC, Mac & Linux

Whilst something line Xmarks (formerly foxmarks) can keep your passwords & bookmarks in sync there’s a few things it doesn’t – Extensions.

You can sync your entire Firefox profile across multiple machines & keep everything entirely in sync no matter where you are.

Keep Thunderbird Email in Sync

Unless you’re using IMAP using POP email across multiple computers can be frustrating, especially since you have to redownload all your emails twice.

You can follow these instructions to move the existing location of your Thunderbird profile to a shiny new location on your Dropbox.

Get Email Attachments Sent To Your Dropbox

Maildrop is an awesome addon for Dropbox that allows you to send email attachments to your Dropbox folder for instant storage & backup.

Save Instant Messaging Logs

If you use Digsby, Pidgin or Adium you can centralise your Instant Messaging logs in one place using your Dropbox.

1. Create an IM Logs folder on the dropbox
2. Close your IM client down
3. Copy all the logs into that folder
4. Restart up your IM Client then change the log folder to the folder on your Dropbox

Sync Windows Save Games Across Computers

This only works for games that create a save file in the My Games folder on XP, Vista or Windows7. Essentially you need to create a symbolic link from the My Games folder to the folder on your Dropbox.

The following commands are examples, please replace with the paths to your “My Games” locally & on your Dropbox.

Windows XP

junction "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\My Dropbox\My Games" "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\My Games"
mklink /D "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\My Dropbox\My Games" "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\My Games"

Windows Vista

junction "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Dropbox\My Games" "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Games"
mklink /D "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Dropbox\My Games" "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Games"

There’s also a neat application to help you with this called Dropboxifier which streamlines the process of adding folders to Dropbox then creating the much needed symbolic links.

Host a Shared Collaboration Drive for Remote Employees

One of the major benefits of Dropbox is that it acts like a local drive (but sync when something changes). This makes it perfect for companies that utilise a lot of remote employees, essentially you can create a shared drive that could contain:

1. Process Documents
2. Product Development
3. Client Folders
4. Drafts / Ideas

The advantage that Dropbox provides here is that you have complete change / undo history (for 30 days on free accounts). This means it’s impossible also for someone to accidentally delete a file or screw things up.

Save to PDF on OSX

You can use Dropbox to save articles to PDF for later reading, anywhere.

1. Navigate to your /Library folder
2. If it doesn’t already exist, create a new folder in “/Library” called “PDF Services”
3. Create an alias for your “Dropbox” folder and drag it into the “/Library/PDF Services” folder
4. Open a URL in your web browser and select Print
5. Click the PDF dropdown option
6. A “Dropdown alias” should appear. Click it to save the website as a PDF file on your Dropbox

Use Dropbox as your personal SVN

If you’re a developer who likes to write applications locally & also on your laptop you can use Dropbox to sync your svn repository. Simply create the svn repository on the dropbox & use the local url i.e: file:///C:/path/to/dropbox/folder/myrepo

I wouldn’t use this setup to collaborate with another user as the repository could get corrupted if you make commits on two computers & one syncs before the other.

If you need help on setting up a local repository you can check out this awesome Lifehacker tutorial.

Use Dropbox to show off Design Mockups

If you’re building a website design in flat html & want to show off your mockups to a client without upload to a server you can simply create a folder in your DropBox then get the public URL for your site (i.e. for index.html).

Share this URL with your friends or clients & start getting feedback right away. The good thing is that this updates every time you make a change & save so no more worrying you uploading the latest changes via FTP.

Use Dropbox to host a static website

DropPages provides a useful service to help you host static websites via Dropbox. Simply edits the files on your computer then they’ll sync automatically. Setup is really simple, you just need to share the folder to DropPages & they’ll take care of the rest.

Read books on your iPhone

Dropbox recently created a nice iPhone interface for the web application, allowing you to easily log in & view the files in your Dropbox.

The beauty of this is that you can open PDF’s & other text files on your iPhone then leave them live in a Safari tab to read whenever you like.

You can also browse other documents that you might need on the go, for example Airline or travel itineraries.

Sync your iTunes folder across multiple computers

One thing that always annoyed me was having different music on my PC vs my Macbook. Fortunately you can use Dropbox to sync your iTunes library across both computers to enjoy the same songs wherever you are.

If you planning to do this you’ll more than likely need to upgrade to 50GB of space or more ($9.99/month).

All you need to do is:

• Move your iTunes library folder to a Folder on your Dropbox (i.e. music/itunes)
• Start iTunes with shift pressed (option on OSX)
• It’ll pop up with a box asking for you to choose the library, simply choose the location on the Dropbox

Source: How to Sync you iTunes folder in 3 easy steps

Keep Desktop Wallpapers in one place

Ever reformatted your PC & realised that you’ve deleted all your snazzy desktop wallpapers? Simply store them all on your dropbox.

Track Thieves that might steal your equipment

This is probably one of the sneakiest DropBox tricks that we came across during our research. You can use your DropBox to catch potential laptop thieves or security breaches.

You can set up a Keylogger on your system to run in the background & save all the logs to your DropBox. If anyone ever steals your laptop or uses it without you knowing & connects to the internet then you’ll have a complete breakdown of everything they’ve been doing (including all the services they may have logged into).

If you want a more robust solution than using Dropbox we highly recommend Prey.

Here’s a quick snapshot of all the Panda updates since February 23rd, you could say we’ve lost close to 90% of our total search traffic:

Unfortunately, Google hasn’t been very transparent about Panda (other than this quite ambiguous post). Here at StoreCrowd we decided that waiting it out might be the best course of action (since we believed that lots of sites we were seeing had been wrongly demoted), however it’s now November & we’ve decided to take drastic action to beat Panda (more on this later).

Who Else Has Been Hit?

We weren’t the only site to fall victim, many of the sites in the coupon space were hit. Below is just a small sample of some of the more established players that were pandalized:

Tjoos

Tjoos has gradually dropped almost 50% of their total traffic since December last year, the biggest decline occurs in February which was around the time of Panda 1.0.

CurrentCodes

CurrentCodes has been impacted by a number of updates (similar to us), they too have shown no sign of recovery.

My Coupons

My Coupons is starting to see a slight recovery in the last few months, I do know they have put in an awful lot of work into trying to beat panda.

Coupon Mountain

It had looked like Coupon Mountain was safe from Panda, they’ve had some good gains over the last 12 months but the September update seems to have hit them hard with an almost 60% reduction in US traffic.

Ultimate Coupons

Ultimate Coupons was hit in the Feb update similar to us, they look to be slowly gaining on traffic again, but we see no sign of a recovery here.

Coupon Winner

Coupon Winner doesn’t seem to have felt as much brunt of Panda as some of the other sites above but they are way down on US traffic from this time last year.

Why Have Coupon Websites Been Affected So Badly?

All the sites above are reputable, they have been around for years, they have dedicated teams of staff making sure coupons are up to date, they have good relationships with merchants providing exclusive coupons – however these are all factors that a search algorithm cannot take into consideration when deciding whether a site is high quality or not.

So why is Panda targeting coupon websites? This is a hard question to answer but I believe that we know quite a number of things about coupon websites (since we run one ourselves!):

Indexed pages

Coupon websites in particular tend to run a lot of pages (1 for each merchant), so you’ll tend to see 20k or more pages indexed depending on how wide they cast their net (i.e. do we try to cover ALL merchants like RetailMeNot or do we scale back to a manageable amount).

Templated design

Most pages run off a custom CMS, they have an almost identical layout & content structure.

Merchant descriptions

Many coupon sites do not write fully unique descriptions for merchants, copying a paragraph from the about page on the merchant’s website is just not enough anymore.

Duplicated coupons

You have many sites all chasing the same offers, some will rewrite the offers others will post them verbatim. In general there’s a big overlap in content across sites here because there’s only so many ways you can rewrite “15% Discount On Your Order.” In this scenario the sites that write detailed unique descriptions for each coupon seem to come out ahead.

Boilerplate text

You’ll see many coupon websites include paragraphs of text on each page that are almost identical – Get Merchantname coupons, promo codes, discount codes & more here. Panda appears to not like seeing duplicated text across pages.

Keyword repetition

It’s clear that Panda takes user intent towards a page into consideration, for example is the page relevant for the users query? Coupon websites will generally use a boilerplate <title> tag for merchants. Merchantname Coupon Codes & Promo Codes, however panda might not be happy seeing the same title tag across 20k pages?

Thin content

Coupon websites have a number of ways they generate thin content, tag pages are one example, creating an individual page for each coupon is another. This will drastically increase the amount of onsite duplication & could be a contributing factor to Pandalization.

User submitted coupons

Sites with user generated content appear to be doing better than those who employ staff to manage the coupons, could this be because the similar writing style of staff duplicates across many pages more?

Is Panda Doing A Good Job At Figuring Out Quality Coupon Sites?

Perhaps this is a heated question, but as it currently stands this is a no. The problem here is that in general the coupon space has a fairly low barrier to entry, anyone can sign up to the affiliate networks then throw up a blog with CouponPress or one of the other scripts to start their own site. However, it’s a very tough space to do well in.

One thing I do see is that Panda is having a hard time floating the important coupon sites to the top for specific merchant queries, lets understand what quality measures a coupon website has:

Unique CMS (i.e. not WordPress)

Chances are that if a company invests in a custom CMS for their site then they are serious about the space.

Working Coupons

This is perhaps the single more important thing, a coupon website needs to make sure their coupons work. However in an industry where the last click is the winner (i.e. giving you a commission) there’s still incentive out there for coupon sites to show expired coupons & still make money. This is a very poor user experience.

Regular Updates

How often are coupons added & expired? Movement on an individual page level shows freshness & quality. Stale sites will not update as often.

Exclusive Coupons

A high number of exclusive coupons shows that a coupon site is putting effort into creating great relationships with merchants.

Great User Experience

Is the site fast? Is it easy to get access to the coupons?

Some of the above can be determined by Panda, most of it can’t. Therefore Panda is currently trying to determine quality in an industry where it can’t effectively do it with any accuracy.

Examples Of Poor Quality Results In The Coupon Space

These are just 3 merchants chosen at random, all have issues with the first 10 results from a quality perspective. We simply can’t explain why any of the sites below should be ranking over & above any of the coupon websites we analysed earlier in this post.

1800Flowers Coupons

Made for Adsense website sitting in #3, doesn’t provide any active coupons for 1800 Flowers at all.

Kohls Coupons

Two made for Adsense sites within the top 10, they follow a similar format to the site above. Lots of text, no coupons & no substance.

Snapfish Coupons

Two more low quality exact match domains in the top 10 for this query, again they follow a similar format. These ones actually have coupons but they are out of date.

Recovering From Panda

At StoreCrowd we’ve made some drastic changes to our site, we’re waiting to see if any sort of recovery happens in the New Year as we don’t feel we can do anything more to improve the quality of our site. We’ll do a followup post here if things go well.

In the meantime we’d love to hear your thoughts on Google Panda, the coupon space or even your own efforts to get unPandalized.

There is one thing that we’ll warn you about upfront, whilst many of the different tax software makers provide a free way to submit your return, you are mostly likely to not get access to advanced features (which may provide heavy savings or advice on reducing your tax bill further). As with anything financial we do recommend consulting with a tax professional & please do not consider this post as financial advice.

TurboTax

5 Editions: Free, Basic ($19.95), Deluxe ($29.95), Premier ($49.95), Home & Business ($79.95)
Additional Cost for State Tax: Yes ($27.95 for Free & $36.95 for other packages)

Beyond the free edition TurboTax will get your W-2 & 1099 forms directly from employers, reduce risk of auditing & maximize your deductions for the biggest refund.

Save with our TurboTax Coupons

H&R Block

4 Editions: Free, Basic ($19.95), Deluxe ($29.95), Premium ($49.95)
Additional Cost for State Tax: Yes ($27.95 for Free & $34.95 for other Packages)

Above the free plan, moving up to the Basic you can import last years data, moving up to the Deluxe allows you to import W-2 & 1099 data + step by step instructions to maximize your return. Once again the Premium package is for self employed users.

Save with our H&R Block Coupons

TaxACT

3 Editions: Free, Deluxe Federal Edition ($9.95), Ultimate Bundle ($17.95)
Additional Cost for State Tax: Yes ($14.95 for Free & $8 for Deluxe), State is included in the Ultimate Bundle.

If you opt to go for something beyond the Free Edition with TaxACT then you’ll get extra calculators & reports, better maximization of deductions & the ability to import data from last year. TaxACT is definitely one of the more affordable solutions on the market as you can file State & Federal Taxes for just $17.95.

CompleteTax

3 Editions: Free, Deluxe ($29.95), Premium MVP ($59.95)
Additional Cost for State Tax: Yes ($29.95 for Free & $29.95 for Deluxe), State is included in the Premium MVP Package.

Upgrading to the Dexlue CompleteTax package give you the ability to handle individual deducations, retirement (401k) & investment income scenarios. Premium handles self employment tax.

TaxSlayer

3 Editions: Free, Classic ($9.95), Premium ($19.95)
Additional Cost for State Tax: Yes ($14.90 for Free & $4.95 for other Packages)

Moving on from the Free package, Classic allows you to import all necessary forms (W2 & 1099), the Premium Package has Live Phone Support, Previous Year Comparisons & Tax Audit advice.

Taxbrain

3 Editions: EZ ($14.95), Basic ($19.95), Deluxe ($39.95), Premium ($69.95)
Additional Cost for State Tax: Yes ($29.95 for all Packages)

TaxBrain allows you to complete a simple tax return in ~15mins due to its simplistic user interface. The basic package is fine for single couples or married couples without kids, once you have dependants then they recommend the basic package & then up to the Deluxe package if you have itemized deductions & more complex tax requirements.

This list covers the most reputable merchants that sell checks, along with some other useful information & any available coupons (to help you save addition money on your checks).

Checks In The Mail –

Checks In The Mail has been a leader supplier of bank checks since 1922. They have an extensive line of designer checks including Hello Kitty, Garfield, Disney & Gilbert.

Reordering: Yes
Prices start from: $9.99 per box
Minimum Delivery Time: 9 Days from Order with Overnight Shipping
Coupons: Yes

Save with our Checks in the Mail Offer Code

4Checks-

4Checks has over 800 check designs & has a number of different sites under the umbrella: Check Crafters, Check Gallery, Styles Checks, LifeChecks, Identity Checks & Artistic Checks.

Reordering: Yes
Prices start from: $10.95 per box
Delivery: 1-4 Business Days with In-Plant Rushing Option
Coupons: Yes

Save with our 4Checks Coupons

ChecksUnlimited –

Reordering: Yes
Prices start from: $16.99
Minimum Delivery Time: 3 Business Days with In-Plant Rush
Coupons: Yes

Save with our ChecksUnlimited Coupons & this Checks Unlimited Offer Code.

Bradford Exchange Checks –

Reordering: Yes
Prices start from: $15.95
Minimum Delivery Time: 4 Days with SecureShip
Coupons: Yes

Save with our Bradford Exchange Checks Coupons

CarouselChecks –

Reordering: Yes
Prices start from: $4.99 per box for Value Checks
Minimum Delivery Time: 6 Days with Priority Mail
Coupons: Yes

Save with our CarouselChecks Coupons

PureChecks –

Reordering: Yes
Prices start from: $5.99 per box for Super Value Checks
Minimum Delivery Time: 6 Days with Priority Mail
Coupons: Yes

Save with our CarouselChecks Coupons

Don’t forget that when you order there’s hundreds of different styles of checks you can go for depending on the price you’re willing to pay. CarouselChecks definitely provide cheap checks if you are price conscious (starting from $4.99 + $2 off coupon).

Well, all is not lost. You still have some time to make it up with some last minute Valentine’s Day Gifts, we’ve had selected some of our finest stores to help you.

Flowers

Valentine’s Day is the busiest time of the year for flowers, luckily the US has a fairly robust flower network allowing you to get same day & pretty reliable next day delivery in most sates. We’ve hand picked the best flower merchants below.

FTD Flowers –

Price Range: $39.99 Upwards
Cost of Basic Roses: $79.99
Delivery Cost: Next Day Delivery Fees

FTD Coupons: Click for 10% Discount on your order

Teleflora –

Price Range: $39.95 Upwards
Cost of Basic Roses: $69.95
Delivery Cost: ~$14.95

Teleflora Coupons: Click for 10% Discount on your order

1800 Flowers –

Price Range: $49.99 Upwards
Cost of Basic Roses: $79.99
Delivery Cost: Included – Add $10 for Next Day

Browse our range of 1800 Flowers Coupons

ProFlowers –

Price Range: $39.99 Upwards
Cost of Basic Roses: $69.99
Delivery Cost: Next Day Delivery Fees

Browse our range of ProFlowers Coupons

Gifts for Her

Got that special lady in your life that you want to impress? Chances are she’s not impressed that you missed Valentine’s Day so you better get her something extra special! Lingerie, Jewellery or Flowers should do the trick.

Victoria’s Secret –

Women love lingerie & what better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than to pick out your favourite piece for her at Victoria’s Secret?

Browse our range of Victoria’s Secret Coupons

Tiffany & Co –

Your loved one might not be the lingerie type, but fear not pretty much every woman on the planet loves Tiffany Jewelry. Be careful though, it may set the scene for some pretty expensive Valentine’s Days to come.

Browse our range of Tiffany & Co Coupons

Ice.com –

Ice.com provides beautiful Jewelry at affordable prices, you should be able to find a nice gift for $45 and above.

Browse our range of Ice.com Coupons

PersonalizationMall –

What better way to say I Love You than to write it on a mug, or t-shirt or some other object that she loves?

Browse our range of PersonalizationMall Coupons

RedEnvelope –

RedEnvelope is a great place for gifts, with heaps of personalization options you’re sure to find something to impress her.

Browse our range of RedEnvelope Coupons

PotteryBarn –

For the more contemporary lady out there Potterybarn has some beautiful keepsake or jewelry boxes, this is a good follow-up gift if you’ve already forked out for Jewellery last year!

Browse our range of PotteryBarn Coupons

Gifts for Him

Women often think that men are difficult to buy gifts for, but that’s generally because they buy themselves the things they want the most. He will appreciate anything fun, technology related or useful. If all else fails then you’ll have to use your imagination (or computer games)!

ThinkGeek –

Is your Husband or Boyfriend a major geek? Then look no further than ThinkGeek, the options are infinite. Lego, Lightsabers, Office Warfare, T-Shirts, Gadgets, Lasers, Pens & heaps more geekery.

Browse our range of ThinkGeek Coupons

Apple –

If you want your man to love you forever then getting him a MacBook Pro or iPad is one of the routes into his heart (it’s scientifically proven….honest). Do it.

Browse our range of Apple Store Coupons

Amazon –

Amazon has everything on the planet, at kick-ass prices. If all else fails just go into the grooming section & get him a new razor. Preferably one that you can use too.

Browse our range of Amazon Coupons

Discount Mags –

If your man is a Magazine nut, then you can keep him preoccupied by getting him a number of dirt cheap magazine subscriptions. You could secretly use these to drop hints (i.e. DIY Monthly instead of Maxim).

Browse our range of Discount Mags Coupons

Steam –

Men love computer games, and if your man does I’m sure you already know about it. Steam do awesome gift cards that will allow him to buy the game of his choice

Steam doesn’t offer coupons but we’d love it if you left a Steam Review

Threadless –

if you’re running on a budget then Threadless do T-Shirts at awesome prices, you’ll easily be able to find one that suits his individual style & personality.

Browse our range of Threadless Coupons

Romantic Getaways

Sick & tired of buying separate gifts for each other? Why not book a beautiful hotel room for a night or whisk each other away for a romantic weekend instead?

Hotels.com –

Not much really has to be said about this one, find a beautiful hotel, bring your loved one & we’ll leave the rest up to you.

Browse our range of Hotels.com Coupons

Expedia –

Now that we’re coming out of Winter, Expedia has some good last minute getaway deals for Couples. Really makes Valentine’s Day seem special when you get to spend it somewhere exotic (i.e. not at home).

Browse our range of Expedia Coupons

Daily Deals

More of the impulsive type? Local deal sites like Groupon & LivingSocial do once off deals every day that are sure to suit your partner (spa’s, getaways, facials & more).

Groupon –

Give the gift of local adventure to friends, family or anybody who needs to get out more. You’ll be giving presents worth twice what you paid, and without going shopping or paying shipping costs.

Living Social –

LivingSocial offers daily deals on handpicked experiences that can be shared with friends.

With the number of searches increasingly dramatically more & more coupon websites are starting to pop up, but which ones can you trust to come through with the goods – working coupons that will save you money. In this post today we’re going to look at some of the popular coupon websites, highlighting their strengths & weaknesses (from the viewpoint of someone who also runs a coupon website). We will cover deal & reward websites in a  separate post!

RetailMeNot –

Started: 2006

Popular Merchants: Victoria’s Secret, Lands End, Kohls, Gap, L.L. Bean, The Childrens Place

RetailMeNot is the Grand Poobah of coupon sites in terms of number of visitors & reach. Created by two guys from our hometown (Melbourne) in 2006 they have grown the site to almost 8M unique visitors per month. The site was recently sold to WhaleShark Media for a rumored $91M.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. The site design is simple yet functional, very easy to navigate & get the coupons you need, this has been a major factor in their success
2. Very large range of merchants (over 65,000) & coupons. They display coupons from any merchant under the sun
3. Large userbase & active community – many advocates of the site

Cons:

1. Moderation of coupons is hit & miss. There’s quite a lot of stores with non-working or bogus coupons
2. They have caused a bit of upset amongst competitors for posting exclusive coupons from other websites

CouponCabin –

Started: 2004

Popular Merchants: Sears.com, Target.com, Lord & Taylor, Shoes.com, Eastbay, Bluefly

CouponCabin is one of the major players who have been around longer than RetailMeNot, they have over 33 employee’s on Linkedin & have been in the INC 500 (fast growing companies).

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. They negotiate a large number of exclusive coupons you can’t find anywhere else (probably the most out of all the coupon websites)
2. They mark specific coupons as ‘guaranteed to work’ or they’ll buy you dinner

Cons:

1. They have an annoying captcha that you have to enter every time you visit the site (not sure how many users this puts off)
2. They only seem to list coupons from stores they make money from, which means there’s a large number of merchants missing

Coupon Chief –

Started: 2005

Popular Merchants: Dell, Bath & Body Works, The North Face, ULTA Beauty

Coupon Chief takes the RetailMeNot model and adds a twist, paying users to share coupons on the site. Everything is then moderated by the users via coupon feedback. They were sent a Cease & Desist letter last year from CouponCabin for using their exclusive coupons without permission.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. You can make money by submitting coupons with their ‘Pays2Share’ scheme
2. You can also choose to donate money to charity for certain merchants

Cons:

1. The monetary incentive seems to cause a lot of spam coupons that don’t actually work, therefore the quality is low
2. They don’t offer anything too unique – bit of a mishmash of features from other coupon websites

CouponMountain –

Started: 2002

Popular Merchants: Target.com, Kohls, Ann Taylor Loft, KMart, Dicks Sporting Goods

CouponMountain has been around for a long time, they have a solid following of loyal users & are pretty close in size to CouponCabin.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Good clean navigation, coupons are split nicely into categories
2. CouponMountain splits out user submitted coupons as “Unverified” so you know they might not work

Cons:

1. If you’re a merchant you can get featured higher in the listing on a CPC basis, this means that search results might not be impartial (and could reduce quality)
2. Expiry dates aren’t visible on the coupons

MyCoupons –

Started: 2002

Popular Merchants: Expedia, Old Navy, Indochino, Drugstore.com, Harry & David

MyCoupons is one of the oldest online coupon websites, having been around since early 2000′s. They have a bit of a rocky past within the affiliate community (which seems to have been cleared up).

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Decent amount of exclusive coupons
2. They have individual staff members dedicated to specific merchants
3. Good stats on coupons so you can see the popularity over time

Cons:

1. The coupon activation (click to show) using flash is a bit flakey at times
2. They seem to double up on coupons quite a bit
3. Fair amount of coupons with strange expiry dates or coupons that don’t work

Savings.com –

Started: 2008

Popular Merchants: Barnes & Noble, H&R Block, ProFlowers, NFL Shop, 1800-Flowers

Savings.com has some big backers in Silicon Valley & they have a considerable investment behind them. The site is clean, usable & has some good community features.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Clean design, pretty easy to navigate & find what you need
2. Coupons are ranked by the community with “votes”
3. They do a good job of getting the community involved with their DEALPRO program

Cons:

1. You have to click to open a new window to see the code before you can use it (then it might not work)
2. Comments on Coupons are quite hidden away – they fail to really show how active their community is or not
3. Lots of coupons posted as coupons that are really deals on products or “sales”

Offers.com –

Started: 2008

Popular Merchants: Buy.com, The Limited, Reebok, Rocawear, FTD Flowers

Offers.com is in a similar bucket to Savings.com but they put a specific twist on coupons. The site revolves around specific offers & comparing the best products or services for that specific offer (i.e. antivirus software). They have a traditional coupon model over the top of the offers model.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Get specific email updates from your favourite merchants
2. Browse offers around a specific range of products (i.e. Desktop Computers)
3. They specify whether a specific deal is Sitewide or not

Cons:

1. Site can be hard to navigate, there’s a sense that it’s made a bit too much for SEO with the depth of categories & pages
2. They only seem to work with merchants they can make money with, therefore there’s quite a large number of offers/deals missing

Buxr –

Started: 2006

Popular Merchants: Coldwater Creek, Esprit, New York & Company, Aeropostale, Banana Republic

Buxr is a side project started by Yan from ProBargainHunter & the owner of CheapStingyBargains. It revolves heavily around the community submitting deals & coupons, but they have quite a nice unique system to reward members for the best deals/coupons each day.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Simple design, no flashy bells or whistles but it works well
2. Fantastic community, very vibrant & respond well to the daily prizes on offer
3. Good mix of coupons & deals being submitted every day
4. Decent quality control from the moderators

Cons:

1. Still quite small, therefore missing some of the depth of the bigger sites (in terms of volume of coupons)

StoreCrowd –

Started: 2010

Popular Merchants: Fabric.com, Amazon.com, Macy’s, FreshDirect, Vet Depot, Lands End, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, GoToMeeting

StoreCrowd is our own website, the reason we’re listing it here is that we believe we have something to offer that’s different than the other coupon websites out there. And over time, we hope you’ll join us.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Simple, functional design – Autocomplete on search, clean tabs for navigation
2. Easy email notifications for the stores you love (fans)
3. Strict quality control for user submissions
4. Live monitoring of non-working coupons
5. Impartial – Coupons from any merchants are listed provided the quality is high
6. Consumer reviews of stores

Cons:

1. Lacks exclusive coupons that some of the larger sites can negotiate
2. Breadth of coupons is smaller than the larger sites
3. Overall user base is smaller

Tjoos –

Started: 2007

Popular Merchants: 6PM, Best Buy, Otter Box, ProFlowers, Walmart, Chegg, CafePress

Tjoos is another Australian born coupon website, created by Bart Jellema in 2007 then sold to Internet Brands last year. No real new features have been added since the acquisition, however the number of ads has dramatically increased.

How Many Users:

Pros:

1. Very fast site with a low footprint – loads quickly
2. Large number of merchants & coupons
3. Good additional options for merchants to manage their own coupons

Cons:

1. Low quality – large numbers of pages with non-working coupons or no coupons at all
2. No real quality control for user submitted coupons
3. They make their Google advertising look like coupons to improve revenue on pages without coupons – not a good user experience

What’s your favourite Coupon Website & Why? Let us know in the comments!

Last updated: 25th August

Baby & Toys

Babies ‘R’ Us –

• View latest Babies ‘R’ Us Weekly Ad
• Latest Babies ‘R’ Us Coupons

Toys ‘R’ Us –

• View latest Toys ‘R’ Us Weekly Ad
• Latest Toys ‘R’ Us Coupons

Cosmetics & Fragrances

Drugstore.com –

• View latest Drugstore.com Weekly Sales
• Latest Drugstore.com Coupons

Sally Beauty Supply –

• View latest Sally Beauty Supply Weekly Ad
• Latest Sally Beauty Supply Coupons

Ulta –

• View latest Ulta Weekly Ad
• Latest Ulta Coupons

Sephora –

• View latest Sephora Weekly Ad
• Latest Sephora Coupons
  

Crafts

A.C. Moore –

• View latest A.C. Moore Weekly Ad
• Latest A.C. Moore Coupons

Hancock Fabrics –

• View latest Hancock Fabrics Weekly Ad
• Latest Hancock Fabrics Coupons

Hobby Lobby –

• View latest Hobby Lobby Weekly Ad
• Latest Hobby Lobby Coupons

Jo-Ann –

• View latest Jo-Ann Weekly Ad
• Latest Jo-Ann Coupons

Michaels –

• View latest Michaels Weekly Ad
• Latest Michaels Coupons

Oriental Trading –

• View latest Oriental Trading Weekly Ad
• Latest Oriental Trading Coupons

Department Stores & Clothing Stores

AJWright –

• View latest AJWright Weekly Ad
• Latest AJWright Coupons

Bealls –

• View latest Bealls Weekly Ad
• Latest Bealls Coupons

Bed Bath & Beyond –

• View latest Bed Bath & Beyond Weekly Ad
• Latest Bed Bath & Beyond Coupons

BigLots –

• View latest BigLots Weekly Ad
• Latest BigLots Coupons

Bon-Ton –

• View latest Bon-Ton Weekly Ad
• Latest Bon-Ton Coupons

Boscov’s –

• View latest Boscov’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Boscov’s Coupons

Burlington Coat Factory –

• View latest Burlington Coat Factory Weekly Ad
• Latest Burlington Coat Factory Coupons

Carson Pirie Scott –

• View latest Carson Pirie Scott Weekly Ad
• Latest Carson Pirie Scott Coupons

Dillard’s –

• View latest Dillard’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Dillard’s Coupons

Duckwall ALCO –

• View latest Duckwall ALCO Weekly Ad
• Latest Duckwall ALCO Coupons

Elder-Beerman –

• View latest Elder-Beerman Weekly Ad
• Latest Elder-Beerman Coupons

Family Dollar Stores –

• View latest Family Dollar Stores Weekly Ad
• Latest Family Dollar Stores Coupons

Five Below –

• View latest Five Below Weekly Ad
• Latest Five Below Coupons

Fred Meyer –

• View latest Fred Meyer Weekly Ad
• Latest Fred Meyer Coupons

Goody’s –

• View latest Goody’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Goody’s Coupons

Kroger –

• View latest Kroger Weekly Ad
• Latest Kroger Coupons

JC Penney –

• View latest JC Penney Weekly Ad
• Latest JC Penney Coupons

KMart –

• View latest KMart Weekly Ad
• Latest KMart Coupons

Kohl’s –

• View latest Kohl’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Kohl’s Coupons

Macy’s –

• View latest Macy’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Macy’s Coupons

Nordstrom –

• View latest Nordstrom Weekly Ad
• Latest Nordstrom Coupons

Old Navy –

• View latest Old Navy Weekly Ad
• Latest Old Navy Coupons

Saks Fifth Avenue –

• View latest Saks Fifth Avenue Weekly Ad
• Latest Saks Fifth Avenue Coupons

Sears –

• View latest Sears Weekly Ad
• Latest Sears Coupons

ShopKo –

• View latest ShopKo Weekly Ad
• Latest ShopKo Coupons

Stein Mart –

• View latest Stein Mart Weekly Ad
• Latest Stein Mart Coupons

Target –

• View latest Target Weekly Ad
• Latest Target Coupons

Younkers –

• View latest Younkers Weekly Ad
• Latest Younkers Coupons

Walmart –

• View latest Walmart Weekly Ad
• Latest Walmart Coupons

DIY / Hardware & Home Improvement

Ace Hardware –

• View latest Ace Hardware Weekly Ad
• Latest Ace Hardware Coupons

Home Depot –

• View latest Home Depot Weekly Ad
• Latest Home Depot Coupons

Lowe’s –

• View latest Lowe’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Lowe’s Coupons

Electronics Retailers

Best Buy –

• View latest Best Buy Weekly Ad
• Latest Best Buy Coupons

Buy.com –

• View latest Buy.com Weekly Ad
• Latest Buy.com Coupons

CompUSA –

• View latest CompUSA Weekly Ad
• Latest CompUSA Coupons

J&R –

• View latest J&R Weekly Ad
• Latest J&R Coupons

Micro Center –

• View latest Micro Center Weekly Ad
• Latest Micro Center Coupons

Office Depot –

• View latest Office Depot Weekly Ad
• Latest Office Depot Coupons

OfficeMax –

• View latest OfficeMax Weekly Ad
• Latest OfficeMax Coupons

Gamestop –

• View latest Gamestop Weekly Ad
• Latest Gamestop Coupons

Radioshack –

• View latest Radioshack Weekly Ad
• Latest Radioshack Coupons

Ritz Camera –

• View latest Ritz Camera Weekly Ad
• Latest Ritz Camera Coupons

Staples –

• View latest Staples Weekly Ad
• Latest Staples Coupons

Wolf Camera –

• View latest Wolf Camera Weekly Ad
• Latest Wolf Camera Coupons

Grocery

A&P –

• View latest A&P Weekly Ad
• Latest A&P Coupons

Albertsons –

• View latest Albertsons Weekly Ad
• Latest Albertsons Coupons

ALDI –

• View latest ALDI Weekly Ad
• Latest ALDI Coupons

Bi-Lo –

• View latest Bi-Lo Weekly Ad
• Latest Bi-Lo Coupons

BJ’s –

• View latest BJ’s Weekly Ad
• Latest BJ’s Coupons

CVS/Pharmacy –

• View latest CVS/Pharmacy Weekly Ad
• Latest CVS/Pharmacy Coupons

GNC –

• View latest GNC Weekly Ad
• Latest GNC Coupons

Harris Teeter –

• View latest Harris Teeter Weekly Ad
• Latest Harris Teeter Coupons

Food Lion –

• View latest Food Lion Weekly Ad
• Latest Food Lion Coupons

Jewel-Osco –

• View latest Jewel-Osco Weekly Ad
• Latest Jewel-Osco Coupons

Pathmark –

• View latest Pathmark Weekly Ad
• Latest Pathmark Coupons

Publix –

• View latest Publix Weekly Ad
• Latest Publix Coupons

Riteaid –

• View latest Riteaid Weekly Ad
• Latest Riteaid Coupons

Safeway –

• View latest Safeway Weekly Ad
• Latest Safeway Coupons

Save-A-Lot –

• View latest Save-A-Lot Weekly Ad
• Latest Save-A-Lot Coupons

Shop&Stop –

• View latest Shop&Stop Weekly Ad
• Latest Shop&Stop Coupons

Shoprite –

• View latest Shoprite Weekly Ad
• Latest Shoprite Coupons

Stater Bros –

• View latest Stater Bros Weekly Ad
• Latest Stater Bros Coupons

Sweetbay –

• View latest Sweetbay Weekly Ad
• Latest Sweetbay Coupons

TrueValue –

• View latest TrueValue Weekly Ad
• Latest TrueValue Coupons

Walgreens –

• View latest Walgreens Weekly Ad
• Latest Walgreens Coupons

Wholefoods –

• View latest Wholefoods Weekly Ad
• Latest Wholefoods Coupons

Winn Dixie –

• View latest Winn Dixie Weekly Ad
• Latest Winn Dixie Coupons

Pets

Petco –

• View latest Petco Weekly Ad
• Latest Petco Coupons

Pet Smart –

• View latest Pet Smart Weekly Ad
• Latest Pet Smart Coupons

Sports & Hunting Retailers

Bass Pro Shops –

• View latest Bass Pro Shops Weekly Ad
• Latest Bass Pro Shops Coupons

Big 5 Sporting Goods –

• View latest Big 5 Sporting Goods Weekly Ad
• Latest Big 5 Sporting Goods Coupons

Cabela’s –

• View latest Cabela’s Weekly Ad
• Latest Cabela’s Coupons

Dick’s Sporting Goods –

• View latest Dick’s Sporting Goods Weekly Ad
• Latest Dick’s Sporting Goods Coupons

Dunham Sports –

• View latest Dunham Sports Weekly Ad
• Latest Dunham Sports Coupons

Gander Mountain –

• View latest Gander Mountain Weekly Ad
• Latest Gander Mountain Coupons

Sports Authority –

• View latest Sports Authority Weekly Ad
• Latest Sports Authority Coupons

Posterous

Gone are the days of logging into WordPress. Posterous makes it ridiculously simple to blog, or infact add any type of media you want to your post. Simply send an email to post@posterous.com & you’re all set to go. The beauty of Posterous is that it recognizes media within your email & automatically formats it in the post.

You can either take a Posterous subdomain (i.e. yourname.posterous.com) or use your own domain, they’ll also give you 1GB of storage for images/photos & other media.

ScribeFire

One of the drawbacks of using something like Posterous is that you really need to be starting your blog from scratch on it. It’s difficult to port over from another software or platform & bring the SEO benefit with you.

Many of us (just like the blog here) are using WordPress as our blogging platform. WordPress inherently has a number of flaws, the biggest of which is that you need to log in to create your post. ScribeFire almost turns your browser into Posterous (minus the pretty stuff they do with Images/Videos).

Simply install the extension/plugin then add the credentials of your blog. You will now be able to write posts from within your browser without having to log into WordPress. This is insanely useful when you start manging more than 1 blog (just select the blog you want to publish to from the dropdown).

Note: There’s one slight drawback with ScribeFire in Chrome in that Chrome doesn’t support image uploads. However we’ve got a solution for that below.

Rapportive

As a Blogger one of your core activities will be connecting with people, that could be people within your blogging network or your readers. If you use GMail then Rapportive gives a beautiful social insight into the recipients social networks.

TextExpander

TextExpander is every Bloggers dream tool, it allows you to trigger elements of text that you might use frequently in just a few keystrokes. Use it to stop yourself from making frequent typo’s, use multiple email signatures, fill out forms or add boilerplate content into posts/documents…thx brb.

Evernote

Evernote is your notebook in the cloud, a great tool for Bloggers who like to keep all their sources of inspiration all in a single place. One of my favorite features is that it recognizes text within images.

We ran a feature on 13 Creative Uses for Evernote which goes into much more detail on potential uses.

Expandrive

Uploading images to use in posts is perhaps one of the major annoyances I have with blogging, it’s clunky & difficult. There’s a few ways around this the first being the lovely Expandrive, it simply turns your remote server into another folder on your local machine, allowing you to drag & drop images like you normally would between drives.

Dropbox

Dropbox does a similar thing except your images are stored on their servers (not your own). Dropbox is superb for keeping a rolling backup of all your documents & using it to sync everything across multiple machines. Imagine you’re working on a blog post with over 100 images then you need to go on the road, by keeping those images in your Dropbox you’ll have them synced to your portable machine & you can finish off the post whilst you’re away from home (using ScribeFire of course!).

If you’re interested in some of the other crazy uses out there for Dropbox check out our Dropbox Hacks.

Flickr – Creative Commons Photos

You may be struggling to find decent photos to use in your posts that are royalty free (i.e. you can use without paying for). By going into the Advanced Search section in Flickr you can search by Creative Commons Photos, you’re free to use these in your posts. Just make sure you pay attention to the attribution requirements, you might have to link back to the original photo or cite the source.

Photo Credit: Robee

Picnik

Picnik is a rather savvy online photo editor that can pull your images from Flickr, Facebook or other sources. Perfect for those that don’t like to leave the browser or don’t have Photoshop installed.

Feedly

Inspiration is what keeps Bloggers motivated & since we probably read other blogs (rather than the news) it’s important to settle on an RSS Reader that you love. In this case for me it’s Feedly. It allows you to take all the feeds that you love & organize them into an Magazine like interface. Makes the important news of the day easy to digest.

We’ve put together a collection of our favourite real life test examples (A/B Tests & Multivariate) that have actionable data and results that you can test on your own site. Some of the tests below have seen upwards of 300% improvement (you’d need to triple your traffic to see similar improvements).

Know any tests out there that we’ve missed? Drop us a line in the comments.

Real Life Split Test with a Homeless Man

BaseCamp Homepage Redesign – 14% Improvement

Highrise Signup Page – 30% Improvement

See Plans & Pricing vs Free Trial – 200% Improvement

InDefero See Plans & Pricing – 52% Improvement

Aquasoft Landing Page (Software) – 20% Improvement

Simple Call to Action Increases Twitter Clickthroughs – 12.81% Improvement

Changing Two Words Increased Conversion Rates – 28% Improvement

DailyBurn Google Website Optimizer Case Study – 29.6% Improvement

CareLogger Homepage Redesign – 70% Improvement

2010 Olympic Store Single vs Multi-page Checkout – 257% Improvement

2010 Olympic Store Category Cross Sell – 7% Improvement

Madlib Signup Forms – 20-40% Improvement

Landing Page Free Offer – 36.4% Improvement

Voices.com Homepage Redesign – 400% Improvement

Skype Download Page – 5% Improvement

Surety Bonds Lead Capture – 27% Improvement

Hotfrog Signup Page – 16.6% Improvement

Performable Red vs Green Button – 21% Improvement

TogetherTag Switches Left & Right on Homepage – 20% Improvement

Less Accounting Switches Left & Right on Homepage – 20% Improvement

Rypple Tests ‘Give Feedback’ vs ‘Respond Now’ – 13% Improvement

Bingo Card Creator Signup Form Redesign – 31.2% Improvement

Youtube Runs Huge Multivariate test on Homepage – 15% Improvement

eBox Platform plays with Buttons – 300% Improvement

Case Studies

Sitetuners Case Studies

• Stratfor – 81% Improvement
• Red Envelope – 4.4% Improvement
• Bug Doctor – 32% Improvement
• Real Age Part 1 – 40% Improvement
• Real Age Part 2 – 8.6% Improvement
• Assessment.com – 32.5% Improvement
• Engine Ready – 51% Improvement
• Uniblue – 24.38% Improvement
• SF Video – 58% Improvement
• Power Options – 75% Improvement

Widerfunnel Case Studies

• Rudder – 45.5% Improvement
• Babyage – 22% Improvement
• Overnight Prints – 210% Improvement
• Cook Travel – 48.41% Improvement
• Sims 3 – 128% Improvement

Pageperfect Case Studies

Other Useful Examples

AB Testing + Heatmaps Combined

Twitter Tests Text within Signup Button

Human Photos can Increase Conversions

Zappos Sells 6-30% More Merchandise with Video Demos

Amazon’s Recommendation Engine Increases revenue up to 30% per user

101 Google Website Optimizer Tips

35 Resources for Getting the Most out of Google Website Optimizer

This got me thinking. I already use Evernote for a number of things:

Home Insurance

I’ve stored images of all the valuable items in my house on Evernote in case I ever need to make a claim. Pretty straight forward.

Archiving Bills

I scan & archive all bills on Evernote. This allows me to reduce clutter, protect my privacy a little better (no bills lying around) and also means I can keep much more data without needing physical space to store it.

Tax Receipts

I’m really bad at keep paper receipts, so I scan everything into Evernote so when tax time comes around everything is in the one spot.

Working from anywhere

Applications like Evernote & Dropbox make it easy to take your work anywhere. Start working on a blog post at home, then head out with your iPad. You could finish that post wherever you wanted & publish it without waiting to get home to finish it off.

Research

If I’m researching a particularly big blog post chances are that I will have lots of information in different places. Evernote allows me to clip the information I need & keep it all together. I could put it in one note, or create a own tag for that topic.

Meeting Minutes

I find Evernote very good for taking meeting notes. Create tags for the meeting and you can easily scan through previous notes.

But, this is all fairly straightforward stuff, what are some of the creative uses of Evernote?

Take Away Menus

One of the ideas I’ve been toying with is scanning all the take away menus in our area then simply searching that folder when we feel like a particular type of food. This will allow us to also compare prices across multiple Menu’s.

Business Card Management

How many Business Cards do you have lying around your desk? Scan them into Evernote & instantly you can search across all your business cards to find the contact you’ve been looking for.

PDF Search Engine

Do you have a lot of PDF’s? Fire them all into Evernote & you instantly have access to search all of them no matter where you are.

Braindump Library

Did you know that humans forget 90% of what they learn in a classroom within 30 days? Evernote helps you overcome this by acting as your personal library for anything you want. You can save ideas, pieces of code that you want to come back to, blog posts on a particular topic that you don’t have time to read or forum posts that you want to respond to but don’t have time.

Travel Itineraries

I came across this problem when I was in New York recently. I’d forgotten to print the travel document with my hotel address on it, my iPhone didn’t have roaming enabled so I wasn’t able to get online. Luckily I’d saved all my travel documents to Evernote (and synced before leaving), I was able to fire it up on my iPhone to get full access to my itinerary.

Remember Locations & Car Parking Spots

The Evernote iPhone Application has built in GPS. Very handy if you always forget where you parked your car. Simply take a photo of the car with your iPhone & it’ll pin point it via GPS.

Remember Whiteboard Sessions

How many times have you had an incredible whiteboard session only for someone to come along & wipe it off that evening? Take a photo with Evernote for iPhone & it’ll sync to your account instantly. Peruse it at your leisure.

What useful ways do you use Evernote?

1. Speeds up the crawlability of your site (more pages indexed etc)
2. Decreases the wait time for potential customers
3. Enables users to view more pages in a shorter timeframe
4. Can put much less load on your server (providing that we’re making things more efficient)

In fact, a few of the big players have written case studies on how improving load times increases revenue (or the opposite):

1. Firefox found out that a 1 second increase in page load time decreased conversion rates by 2.7%
2. Facebook Engineering did a study & found that page load time is inversely proportional to the amount of pages viewed on facebook.
3. Amazon reported some time ago that every 100ms of latency costs them 1% of profits.

So, how can one go about understanding how to reduce the time it takes their pages to load? In the past we’ve written a few articles on speed optimization for wordpress. StoreCrowd is developed using Ruby on Rails, therefore the approach to take is pretty different, but the principles are the same.

Benchmarking

We benchmarked using WebPageTest & Pingdom only to find that the site was taking ~6 seconds to fully render:

1. Load time: 6.85 Seconds
2. Time to first byte: 0.527 Seconds
3. Requests: 51
4. Size: 398Kb

Steps Taken

So what are the steps we took to minimize page load time?

Speed up the Application / Server

This was one of the first things to tackle, we’ve noticed that our Time to First Byte is the biggest crucial factor in your website “appearing” to be responsive. I personally feel we’ve got more work to do here (I’d like to see 250ms TTFB).

Use Fragment Caching on element that change less frequently

Fragment Caching allows you to cache blocks of a template without caching the whole page. Therefore some content can remain dynamic without having to flush the cache to refresh it. We’re caching most of the page then refreshing elements based on actions (sidebar gets refreshed less often than popular coupons for example).

Memcache & CacheMoney

We’re using cache-money caching library for ActiveRecord to store data in Memcache. This reduces database queries & serves content quicker.

MYSQL Indexes & Query Optimization

We’ve been using NewRelic to benchmark slow MYSQL queries & application bottlenecks. Use this NewRelic Coupon for 7 Free Gold Days.

Dedicated Database Servers

We’re using dedicated Database Servers with the Percona Build of MYSQL, allocating as much of the RAM as possible to run pure MYSQL queries as efficient as possible.

In the future?

We’ve a number of things we still need to do here, optimizing code is a major part of that. Our plans for the future are:

1. Optimizing Code
2. More MYSQL Optimization
3. Dedicated Memcache Server
4. Upgrading to Ruby 1.9
5. Upgrading to Rails 3
6. Test Ruby Enterprise Build
7. Test Unicorn instead of Passenger
8. Inline Images with Data URL’s

Reduce Number of Queries

Typically if you’re serving everything from a single web server your elements will download in series, meaning one after another. Therefore in order to make your page load faster you either need to serve these elements faster (in parallel if possible), or serve less of them.

Let’s tackle the latter part of that statement first. You can do a number of things to reduce the number of queries & also reduce the size of the elements you’re serving.

Combine Javascript & CSS into a single file & minimize

The first way to reduce queries is to combine any files that you can into a single one. The same principle applies here with the next two recommendations also. We’re using this Rails Asset Packager, which handily takes care of all of the combining & compression for us.

One thing to note here is that we also moved the jquery code into our asset package instead of querying it from Google API’s (which a lot of sites do). The reason for this is we found the latency on our CDN to be a bit faster.

Use CSS Sprites

This isn’t something we’ve rolled out just yet but we’re working on it. The perfect example of CSS Sprites in use is on the new Google Search Results pages.

If you look at the Logo you’ll notice this:

This essentially means that Google only serves one image instead of 20-30, therefore it loads much faster as you’re getting it in a single bulk file (and CSS is positioning it). SpriteMe is a great tool to generate sprites quickly.

Reduce the load time elements

Make sure Gzip is Enabled on your Server

Gzipping your content is crucial. Our homepage is ~50kb in it’s raw format, but Gzipped it’s only 8kb (an 84% saving). This is a major quick win for something that can be implemented in minutes.

Move 3rd party scripts to the bottom of the page

You’ll notice that Facebook Connect is one of the things that lets our load time down (not our fault!), moving these scripts to the bottom of your pages ensures that it doesn’t impact on the rest of your content loading first.

Move all static content to a CDN

This was by far & away the biggest quick win we had. Speedyrails resells Edgecast, a CDN network with some of the best latency we’ve seen. We were able to get up on Edgecast in around 3-4 hours & now all of our static content is served from edge locations (closer to the user) at lightning fast speeds.

We went a step further with Edgecast & implemented multiple subdomains (cdn0-4) for content serving. So you’ll notice that static content is served from 5 subdomains rather than just 1, this ensures that we’re maximizing parallel downloads (as explained earlier in the post). You can follow this CDN Configuration to achieve the same results.

Compress all images with Smusher

Now that we’re downloading everything in parallel from lightning fast servers, the only way to speed things up further is to reduce the size of the images we’re downloading. Github has another awesome plugin for Ruby that runs a lossless image reduction on your images.

We’re yet to roll this into production but it’s saves us around 31% in total image size (around 84kb per page). That almost reduces our entire page size by 25%. Win.

Results

And the results. Drum roll please!

1. Load time: 2.35 Seconds
2. Time to first byte: 0.501 Seconds
3. Requests: 52
4. Size: 475Kb

There’s a few things to note about the results:

1. I believe the load time is more like 1.7s here due to the slowness of Facebook scripts.
2. Yes our pages are meatier (mainly due to the size of the Javascript), this is something we can fix up.
3. We haven’t really reduced the number of requests (you’ll notice a bunch of Facebook stuff actually slowing us down here).
4. The time to first byte hasn’t changed as much as we would like.

There’s a few things to consider here:

1. The cost needed to develop a solution to manage the backups
2. Where to store the backups
3. The cost of storage associated with the backups
4. The impact running a backup might have on the current server resources
5. How to restore backups in the event of a crash/hack

Luckily for you, there’s a number of solutions out there that not only make backups a breeze, but also do in a very, very cost efficient manner.

Almost all of the solutions below utilize Amazon’s S3 storage, which costs around $0.15 per GB / month to store data.

Things get more expensive when you need to backup Photos, Videos or other large media files. But for your site, database & any repositories it should be extremely cheap.One thing to note also is that Amazon keeps up to 3 copies of your backups in at least 2 different geographical locations, which is a major win.

Libraries / Gems / Plugins

Adam’s S3 Rake Task

Adam’s Rake Task makes it incredibly easy to get backups up & running in a matter of minutes. Once installed you can backup quicky with the rake command:

rake s3:backup

Backup Fu

Backup Fu is another rake task that (in their own words) makes backups redonkulously easy. This gem also allows the restore of PostgreSQL databases.

There’s also a very very handy restore command:

BACKUP_FILE=myapp_1999-12-31_12345679_db.tar.gz rake backup_fu:restore

Backup Gem

Backup is a very powerful & configurable gem. You can specify some of the following options:

1. What is being archived (files, folders, arbitrary scripts)
2. How it’s being archived (tar gzip, bz2)
3. Where the archive is going (multiple backup servers? easy)
4. How the archive is going to get there (scp, ftp, mv)
5. Where is will be stored when it gets there
6. How it’s going to be rotated when it gets there (grandfather-father-son, etc)
7. How often will this process happen (customizable cycles)
8. What happens to the working copy after the process (recreate files, folders etc. restart daemons)

Backup

Backup is another Ruby Gem that offers encryption & cycling with backups. You can also choose to receive email notifications when backups are completed. You don’t have to use Amazon S3 with Backup, you can choose to backup anywhere that you can SCP or SFTP into.

DB2S3

DB2S3 is written by a fellow melburnian Xavier Shay, it allows you to quite simply back up your DB & archive on Amazon S3. It also has a handy restore feature:

rake db2s3:backup:restore

AWSS-3

AWSS-3 is a Ruby Library for Amazon’s S3 REST API. This gives you much more control over what you want to store & how you want to store it (buckets). You will need to create your own rake task using the library to back up your data, but you’ll have increased flexibility.

WordPress S3 Backups via Rails

Chances are if you run an application you might have a blog (just like this one) to communicate with your customers or audience. The changing nature of blogging platforms (WordPress is no exception here) leaves blog highly vulnerable to hacking. We covered briefly before how to automate your wordpress updgrades via the commandline.

The WordPress S3 Backup plugin allows you to backup your blog with a rake task (which you can set via a nightly cronjob).

Applications

Backup My App

Backup My App is exclusively for Ruby on Rails applications & provides a visual interface for Backups. You can view changes, browse previous backups & restore.

There’s a free plan that allows you to store up to 1GB. They do however charge $0.60 per Gigabyte ($0.45 more than S3 using the gems/plugins above).

Dropbox

Whilst Dropbox doesn’t provide SSH access you can still SSH to a box that has Dropbox installed then use SCP to copy your backups (which are then synced to anyone that is shared to that folder).

Feedly

Feedly is perhaps hands down the best feed reader we’ve ever used. I personally missed it when I made the change from Firefox to Chrome, but now I can read all my favourite feeds again in all the Magazine like glory.

What we love about Feedly:

1. Easy integration into Chrome, feels like part of the browser.
2. You can segment your feeds into categories
3. Save articles for later if you’re just scanning through

AdBlock

Most of you will probably need no introduction to AdBlock, but in short it Blocks ads. No more slow loading pages because the ad server is overloaded, no more annoying auto playing video or audio ads annoying you. Imagine being able to switch off commericals on your Cable TV, it’s that good.

What we love about Adblock:

1. Get rid of annoying ads (obviously)
2. It’s fast! No slowdowns like external Adblocking software
3. Automatically updates the blacklist for you

RSS Subscription

RSS Subscriptions is something that Chrome has been seriously lacking, it’s something that I would have assumed would be a default feature. Instead there’s an extension that provides the functionality.

If you’re planning on using Feedly as your default RSS reader here’s a handy tip on how to add it:

1. Click the RSS Button
2. Add a new source
3. Name it Feedly
4. Add the URL: http://www.feedly.com/home#subscription/feed/%s[action.subscribe
5. Save
6. Now when you hit the RSS subscribe button it’ll open directly in Feedly. Win!

What we love about RSS Subscription:

1. The fact that we can actually see which sites have RSS Feeds now (Something Chrome has been lacking for quite some time)
2. You can easily integrate with feedly (see above)

Session Manager

Session Manager is a great way to store the current state of the browser & tabs you have open then come back to it whenever you like. So for example you could create a session around all your Social Networking sites, one for all the News Sites you read & one for all your Email Accounts. Simply switch between them whenever you want keeping the session information.

What we love about Session Manager:

1. Manage multiple Google/Gmail Logins at once
2. Manage multiple profiles across Social Networks

Better Gmail

Gmail is an amazing mail program, we use it here to manage all our mail at StoreCrowd. But it’s still not perfect, there’s ads, you’re asked to invite your friends & much more.

Better Gmail simply allows you to customize Gmail a bit more to remove the unwanted features you might not like. Folders4Gmail doesn’t work too well in this extension so I’d recommend installing the standalone version instead.

What we love about Better Gmail:

1. Removes annoying ads
2. Organise labels into folders with Folders4Gmail
3. Fixes the Page Width
4. Removes the Invite Friends Widget
5. Hides Sponsor Messages

Firebug Lite

I always swore that I’d move away from Firefox as soon as Firebug was available for Chrome. There’s a few things missing from Firebug Lite & that’s Javascript debugging, but I’m sure that’s just around the corner. There’s a few other gripes & that’s YSlow! or Google Pagespeed isn’t support as of yet either.

What we love about Firebug Lite:

1. That we finally don’t need Firefox to use Firebug
2. Chrome inspect is great, but Firebug is much more Flexible

Invisible Hand

Since we’re in the online coupons & daily deals game ourselves we often like to praise others who’ve come up with a great idea (especially one that’s different). Invisible hand alerts you whenever a product you’re viewing is found cheaper elsewhere. Pretty nifty.

Currently Supported Stores: A1Books, Abes of Maine, Amazon, Arkivmusic, B&H Photo Video, Best Buy, Borders, Buy.com, Camera World, Capitol Supply, ClubMac, CompUSA, Compuvest, Crutchfield, Drugstore, eBags, eCampus, eForCity, Geeks.com, Guitar Center, Home Depot, Instawares, J&R, Kenmar Watches, Kodak, Logitech, Lowes, MacMall, Meijer, MooseJaw, MrWatch, NewEgg, OfficeMax, onSale, Overstock, PCMall, RadioShack, RitzCamera, Sears, Sony Style, Tech Depot, The House Boardshop, TheNerds.net, TigerDirect.com, Tools-Plus.com, Tower.com, Toys ‘R’ Us, Vanns, Walmart, WatchWear, Wirefly, WolfCamera

What we love about Invisible Hand:

1. That it turns shopping browser plugins on their head, traditionally Coupon/Deal websites would show related coupons for a product or website. Not where the user can buy the product cheaper. Yes, lets worry about the users (not where we can make the most money).
2. Not only does it match products, but it’ll find prices when you do google searches

iMacros

iMacros is an extremely useful utility to script repetitive browser tasks at the press of a button. If you’re looking to get started here’s a few iMacros scripting tutorials.

What we love about iMacros:

1. You can script any repetitive browser actions
2. You can send people a links that’ll automatically fill out a form for them (without them having to do anything)
3. Think of tasks that you do a lot (running reports or checking stats) & simply automate them

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk is a really simple & easy to use Task Manager. The Google Chrome Extension brings the functionality right to your fingertips without having to log into Remember the Milk.

What we love about Remember the Milk:

1. No more logging in to RTM to set up tasks
2. Keep track of all tasks from right within your browser

StayFocusd

Do you find yourself spending too much time on Social Networking or News Sites? StayFocusd allows you to limit the amount of time or simply block these sites in Chrome. It’s pretty customizable in that you can block Delicious, but allow the submit page so you can still bookmark pages.

What we love about StayFocusd:

1. That you can finally limit yourself & remove the distractions of social networks
2. Keeps your productivity high & removes distractions

Yamaha Tenori-On

The Tenori-On is your own personal pocket synthesizer, it has a 16×16 grid that acts as a sequencer and has a number of modes (Score, Random, Draw, Bounce, Push, Solo & Advanced).

Click here to view the embedded video.

BBQ Grill Sword

They don’t cook very often, but when they do you’ll probably find that Geeks like to stab things. Make it easy for them.

Caffeine Molecule T-Shirt

USB Missile Launcher

Just in case pwning workmates at Team Fortress 2 wasn’t enough, this contraption will allow you plan calculated military strikes into neighboring cubicles.

Swedish Firesteel

It’s very rare that the person you buy this for will ever be in a situation where they need to use it, but you can never be too careful. Oh & it makes pretty sparks too.

Ice Invaders Ice Tray

These add all sorts of Awesome to your beverages.

Remote Controlled ‘Moon in my Room’

Yet another excuse to not leave the house, bring the moon into your room.

Star Wars Force FX Lightsabers

Airzooka

Possibly the only example of once Military technology that has been turned into a toy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Star Wars Force Trainer

Solar Backpack Charger

The Spider Catcher

Simplehuman Butterfly Divided Bin

Holy Toast

Moshi Alarm Clock

Mimo Mini USB Monitor

The Ring Thing Bottle Opener

Spy Camera Sunglasses

AirCurve iPhone Amplifier

Joby Gorillapod

Korg Microkorg Synthesizer

Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard

Bose QuietComfort 3 Headphones

Griffin PowerMate

The PowerMate may appear to just be a volume knob for a PC. But it’s so much more than that. This device can only really be fully utilized by a true Geek. As such you should buy it….right away.

Razer Lycosa Gaming Keyboard

120GB Playstation 3

iRobot Roomba 560 Vacuum Robot

Santoku Knives

Flip MinoHD Camcorder

Logitech Harmony 900 Universal Remote

Windows 7 Professional Upgrade

Slingshot Flying Monkey

Origami Sticky Notes

Seasons 1 & 2 of The Big Bang Theory

The Complete Manual of Things that Might Kill You

LEGO Death Star

Apple iMac 27″

iNova X5 LED Flashlight

Rex Plus Electronic Watchdog

Leatherman Multi-Tool

Khet: The Laser Game

Logitech G9 Gaming Mouse

Gunnar Optiks Performance Eyewear

16GB LaCie IamaKey USB Flash Drive

X-Zylo Ultra Flying Gyroscope

iPhone Alarm Clock

Optoma Pico Pocket Projector

Herman Miller Embody Chair

2TB External Hard Drive

Dell Ultrasharp Widescreen LCD Monitor

This time around we’re looking at our favourite concept watches in 2009. But, can you guess which one of these watches actually ended up be produced?

Tact by Julien Bergignat

Swatch Infinity

M60M Watch by Roger Kellenberger

Tima Paper Watch by Julien Bergignat

Eco Linea Watch by Pierre Haulot & William Boullier

F1 Carbon Watch by John Pszeniczny

Zenith Chronomaster XXT Tourbillon El Primero

Luna Crystal Watch

Stress Watch

Since you can’t buy any of these you may want to consider browsing our range of watch coupons or watch stores to find that perfect timepiece.

Here’s some of our favourite Ecommerce Usability Optimisation tips that you can implement right now to see some fantastic results…ninja style.

1. Allow users to transact without Signing Up

Making your transaction process as simple as possible will be one of the greatest & fruitful things you’ll ever do for your business. It’s nice to get registrations & email addresses…..but wouldn’t you rather get a sale & that ongoing relationship with the customer? After all your customers are at your site to shop for something.

Nordstrom allows new customers to buy as a Guest, they then give them an opportunity to register during the checkout process (if they want). This makes the experience much more enjoyable & people are much more likely to register once they’ve commited to the purchase.

2. Make the experience as fast as possible

How quickly your website loads is more important than you might think, imagine if Google loaded slowly? Would you still look at as many pages? A faster website means faster actions & also faster transactions.

There’s three main areas of concern that can have an huge impact on the overall speed of your website:

Cheap Hosting

There’s no excuse to host your website on a cheap server, especially if it’s a business. If you’re on a shared server, chances are that you’re sharing it with anywhere up to 200 other websites. If one of those sites overloads the server (hits front page of Digg / or runs some script that uses lots of resources) it could potentially bring the whole server down to a crawl with it. If you have a VPS or a Dedicated Server you have more of the Server resources at your disposal, this means that you can deliver pages & content faster.

If you have 10 customers all ready to make a purchase then the site goes down or crawls to a halt, would losing $1,000 in revenue be worth paying an extra $100 / month for a decent server?

Disclosure: At StoreCrowd we host with Linode, the setup allows us to completely configure our own servers & also scale with demand should we need it.

Page Caching

If you serve a lot of dynamic requests from a database frequently you might consider caching pages & making them static. This removes the query to the database which means the pages load faster & also puts less stress on your server.

Choice of HTTP Server

Most servers typically run Apache for serving static content, however there’s faster options out there now. Check out Nginx, it’s a leightweight HTTP server that not only uses less memory than apache but also serves up static content much much faster.

We recently switched this blog from Apache2 to Nginx & static content is served 100% faster.

Server Location / Content Delivery

Think about it logically, if your server is located in Los Angeles but someone from New York visits your site there’ll be some latency no matter how fast your server config is. One way to get around this issue is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve all the static content on your site (i.e. images.yoursite.com).

The CDN will serve the static content from one of its Edge locations which is as close to the user as possible. This means when the user requests your site the static content loads much faster whilst your main box loads the dynamic content.

This has two advantages, it speeds up your site considerably from all over the world & also reduces the load on the main server as it doesn’t have to serve up the static content any more.

To learn more about CDN’s check out Amazon CloudFront or Rackspace Cloudfiles.

Learn more about Speeding up your website or blog:

• WordPress Optimization Guide

3. Let users see where they are

Breadcrumbs are useful in a number of different ways, they show your customers their current location in the hierarchy of your site, they also allow customers to travel backwards & forwards between content layers. The example below shows best practice breadcrumbs on Apple.com:

Learn more about Breadcrumbs:

• Breadcrumbs are becoming Increasingly useful
• Breadcrumbs in Web Design – Best Practices

4. Make buttons, links descriptive & encourage people to click them

Often when linking between products or services on a website it’s easy to use language like ‘click here’ or ‘more info.’ You need to let your hyperlinks do the talking, make them descriptive, let me describe the action you want the customer to take.

Not labelling these links properly can also lead to problems for people with screen readers & also for SEO purposes. Search engines look at the content of a link to describe the next page. A great example of how anchor text can impact SEO is doing a Google search for Click Here.

Learn more about using the right text in Hyperlinks:

• You should really follow me on Twitter
• How to Increase signups by 200%

5. Recommend your best content

If you own an Ecommerce store, how often do you analyse your top performing products & feature them on the homepage or in your navigation? the same goes for content rich sites, do you bring your best content close to the homepage so your users can find it more easily?

Smashing Magazine for example lists their most popular posts in the sidebar, instantly allowing new users to browse their best content.

Amazon & other major Ecommerce retailers will display their top selling products to help users make a choice, your users may be easily influenced by the ‘crowd’ which in turn may lead to more sales.

The last thing I bought from Amazon was a Flip MinoHD, makes sense that they’re recommending me accessories to go with it:

Believe it or not but Amazon’s recommendation engine & others such as Cleverset have been known to increase revenues & retention by over 20%.

There’s also a new Y Combinator funded startup called Directed Edge that does some pretty clever recommendations on all types of content (Ecommerce, Social & News).

6. Simplify your Signup

Take a step back & have a think about how much information you actually need from a user when they signup. Chances are you will only need the email address to get started (the rest you can ask for later).

There’s a few other great ways to approach this:

Friendfeed

They use OpenID via Facebook, Google Accounts & Twitter to allow people to signup with just one click. Or a simple signup form (note how they don’t ask users for their password twice like mose signups?).

Mindmeister

The Mindmeister signup is as simple as they come. Simply enter your email address to start:

Whilst you’re waiting for it to arrive you can fill out optional information, the beauty about this signup is that you don’t have to fill in this info if you don’t want to:

7. Simplify your Checkout

Long shopping carts with lots of screens & unecessary information can stop your customers from buying or completing your action of choice.

Smashing Magazine gives some excellent tips which include (but are not limited to):

• Let customers modify, remove & add to the order
• Have a progress indicator to show how long the process is & what to expect next
• Keep the user engaged, don’t give them a reason to leave the checkout – this might mean removing all surrounding navigation & keeping focus on the checkout.
• Let customers know delivery times & additional delivery costs
• Let customers know after they place the order what happens next (hint: Send them an email)
• Followup with the customer after x amount of time to make sure they had a pleasant experience & their product is as described

Learn more about making your checkout simpler:

• 12 Tips for Designing an Excellent Checkout Process

8. Search is your friend

If your users can’t find what they’re looking for the chances are they’ll most likely search for it. So make sure that your search box is featured prominently.

You can use this to your advantage, as Google Analytics allows you to track your internal search usage. This can be incredibly useful in a number of ways:

• Find out the popular products people are searching for – feature these products instead
• Find out products that are popular that you don’t stock
• Get ideas for new content that you don’t currently have but your users are looking for
• Find out if there’s areas of the site that people can’t find or get normal access to

Other useful Usability posts:

• 10 Usability Experts that must be followed on Twitter
• 7 More Useful Tips to help your site convert

The typical update path would either use the built in wordpress upgrade function (which doesn’t work for all server setups) or something like:

1. Visit wordpress.org
2. Download the latest zip file to your pc
3. Unzip the latest file
4. Fire up your FTP program
5. Connect to your server
6. Navigate to your blog folder
7. Upload the new WordPress files
8. Wait 5+ Minutes for the files to upload one by one
9. Visit the upgrade page on your WordPress Blog
10. Finished!

Doing the above could take 15-20mins or more. So how can we do it in less than 10 seconds? Easy, via the command line.

How to Upgrade WordPress from the Linux/UNIX command line

Log into your shell account & replace /var/www/ with the folder that your blog resides in (i.e. home/blog/public_html).

tar -zcvf /var/www/wordpressbackup/120809.tar.gz /var/www/blog
mkdir /var/www/tmp
cd /var/www/tmp
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
cd /var/www/blog
cp -avr /var/www/tmp/wordpress/* .
rm -rf /var/www/tmp/wordpress /var/www/tmp/latest.zip

So, looks simple eh? Lets have a look at what these commands do:

1. Takes a backup of your current WordPress installation (change the date to the current date)
2. Makes a new directory called tmp
3. Changes to the tmp directory
4. Grabs the latest wordpress zip file
5. Unzips the wordpress zip to the tmp directory
6. Changes to the blog directory
7. Copies & replaces everything in your wordpress directory with the new files
8. Removes the tmp directory & the zip file

Caveats

There are a few issues with this method that you should be aware of before trying yourself.

• The folder that your blog sits in will be different then /var/www/blog/ so make sure you change this.
• The commands overwrite existing files but it do not delete legacy or discontinued files
• Make sure you backup your directory & mysql database just incase your make any mistakes

Done upgrading? Now you can check our other guide on speeding up & optimizing WordPress.

We’ve put together a collection of our favourite examples of creative advertising.

Audi vs BMW – Cars

3M – Security Glass

The Axe Effect – Deoderant

Omax – Wide Angle Lenses

Mammoth Mountain – Skiing

123 Fleurs – Flowers

Bic – Razors

Carlsberg – Beer

Cemex – Cement

Che – Men’s Magazine

DealerTrack – Automotive Inventory Solutions

Denver Water

Folgers – Coffee

Hush Puppies – Shoes

Jobs in Town (Germany) – Jobs

Kill Bill 2 – Movie

Live Poker Magazine

Meile (Concept Design) – Hoovers

Unknown?

We actually have no idea what this is an advert for, if you know let us know in the comments.

Windex – Window Cleaner

WWF

Zwilling – Knives

Bynolyt – Binoculars

Chupa Chups – Lollies

Cingular – Cell Phone Network

Hoover

Hot Wheels – Toys

Nikon – Digital Cameras

Pedigree – Dog Food

That’s exactly why we’ve researched the 20 best retail & online store return polices in the country. Know a better return policy than any of the stores listed below? Then get in touch by leaving a comment below or let us know on twitter.

Nordstrom Return Policy – No time limit

• Nordstrom have no limit on returns
• There’s a few stories floating around about a woman who returned snow tires to Nordstrom & they took them back (Nordstrom don’t even sell snow tires)

• View our Nordstrom Coupons

Kohl’s Return Policy – No time limit

• No time limit if you have a valid receipt
• Without receipt you’re granted an even exchange

• View our Kohls Coupons

REI Return Policy – No time limit

• No time limit on return if you have a valid receipt

• View our REI Coupons

LL Bean Return Policy – No time limit

• No time limit on return if you have a valid receipt
• Get return free shipping if you have an LL Bean Visa Card

• View our LL Bean Coupons

Costco Return Policy – No time limit

• No time limit on return if you have a valid receipt
• The return period is only 90 days for consumer electronics

• View our Costco Coupons

Zappos Return Policy – 365 Days

• 365 day return policy
• Free shipping both ways (even for the return if you’re not happy)

• View our Zappos Coupons

Macy’s Return Policy – 180 Days

• Up to 180 Days from Purchase
• If you’re returning a gift you’ll get a store credit

• View our Macys Coupons

Target Return Policy – 90 Days

• Refund with 90 days if you have a valid receipt

• View our Target Coupons

JC Penney – 90 Days

• Refund within 90 days if you have valid receipt

• View our JCPenney Coupons

Toys ‘R’ Us Return Policy – 90 Days

• Refund within 90 days if you have valid receipt (only 45 days for some items)

• View our Toys ‘R’ Us Coupons

Home Depot Return Policy – 90 Days

• Refund within 90 days if you have valid receipt

• View our Home Depot Coupons

GAP Return Policy – 45 Days

• Unworn clothes can be returned within 45 days if you have a valid receipt

• View our GAP Coupons

Wal-Mart Return Policy

• Refund within 90 days if you have valid receipt

• View our Walmart Coupons

Lowe’s Return Policy – 90 Days

• Refund within 90 days if you have valid receipt

• View our Lowe’s Coupons

Sears Return Policy – 90 Days

• Refund with 90 days if you have a valid receipt (30 days for home electronics)

• View our Sears Coupons

Ikea Return Policy – 90 Days

• Refund within 90 days if you have valid receipt

• View our Ikea Coupons

PETsMART Return Policy – 60 Days

• Refund within 60 days if you have valid receipt

• View our PETsMART

Borders Return Policy – 30 Days

• Refund with 30 days if you have a valid receipt

• View our Borders Coupons

Amazon Return Policy – 30 Days

• Return unopened items within 30 days for a full refund (certain items are not refundable)

• View our Amazon Coupons

Barne’s & Noble Return Policy – 14 Days

• 14 Days if you have a valid receipt

• View our Barnes & Noble Coupons