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The last few days we touched on the whys and the how tos of deal blogging.

Today let’s touch upon “what” to blog – specifically if you are deal blogging.

Something I have noticed since the start of Extreme Couponing is a lot of people that began to coupon and hunt deals in the last year are setting themselves up as “experts” and beginning to “teach” classes and online tips about how to coupon, how to shop to save, etc.

This is me after visiting one of those blogs:

The misinformation is astounding. No, you are not an expert at anything after six months or a year. No field, nor hobby proclaims you an “expert” with so little experience. Now, if you are new to the hobby and want to share your hauls, what you have learned, how it works for you, GREAT! And I have to say at least you are shopping and really out there in the trenches as opposed to many other “deal bloggers” that do not shop themselves and wouldn’t know a great deal if it bit ‘em in the hiney. But professing to be an expert… wait a few years and just write helpful posts in the meantime. Your learning experiences, problems and mistakes will not only be more authentic, they will be of greater help to others too!

Another huge “what” in the world of blogging is to remember to write your own material! Do not take someone’s thoughts, ideas, pictures, write-ups, etc. If you did not write an article yourself, do not use it on your blog without permission.

I can’t tell you how often established bloggers need to chase down newbies, who truly just do not know any better, to take down the established blogger’s intellectual property. If you aren’t sure if you can use it – and no, you cannot copy someone’s entire match-up list, coupon page, rebate list or story and paste it to your blog – email the blogger and ask if you can exchange deals. Or perhaps use the top 3 deals and then link back to the original post (this is a very common practice).

Sometimes you see a deal spread all over the blogging world and you would like to post it too. You can chase down the original poster to credit if you like or not (there is a reason that can be tough to do when it has spread, how do you find the original person that started the deal?), but make sure you rewrite the deal into your own words. I can’t tell you how many times I see “And my husband and I took our three kids and …” copied and pasted onto a newbie’s blog when referring to the copied-deal, and the newbie-blogger is a neither married, nor has children! So reword, it isn’t that difficult to do.

And if you see a personal story? That is completely off limits to copy and paste or reword. Ask for permission to use the story, or better yet, explain what it is about and link directly to the story! If you were impressed, others will be too.

If you are ever in doubt about what is permissible to copy and what is not, my wonderful friend Sara writes a blog law series on her blog Saving For Someday. Sara also explains “common use” and what you can/cannot use on your blog via pictures, scans, etc., what must be paid for, and about leaving copyright marks on pictures.

Tomorrow we will discuss the “whens” of deal blogging.

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Yesterday, we touched on the reasons to begin blogging.

Today I would like to discuss the hows of starting to blog.

To begin blogging, you need a blogging platform – blogger or wordpress.org are most common. Blogger is free, but google has a nasty habit of shutting down deal blogs as spam. *poof* You can get your blogger-blog back by dialing in and proving you are a human being to google (versus a spam bot), but wow it is terrible to see your work go away even for a few days.

I recommend that you start by purchasing your blog name. Spend the extra money for privacy because if you do not your name, address, zip code and phone number will be out there for the world to see. If you are on blogger, you can upload that name and it will look like you are self-hosting a blog. When you finally make the transition from blogger to a self-hosted blog that transition will be smoother.

If you are not 100% certain you will be blogging years from now, start with blogger. Since it is free, the $50 for a domain name + privacy will be your only real investment. You can easily customize your blog yourself – no need to pay a designer when working on blogger. If you decide in six months or a year that, “Yeah, I like this and I have people who are following my work”, then move on to a self-hosted wordpress blog.

Coupons, Deals and More is a self hosted wordpress blog. What that means is I started a wordpress.org platform, got a theme (Thesis now), and have the entire site hosted on my own server. I began with wordpress as I knew I would be blogging for a good long time. I purchased my blog name through godaddy as they always have a coupon code (I now own 50+ names). You do NOT have to host with godaddy to buy a domain through them. Godaddy is now the largest seller of domain names, but you can buy through any reputable domain register. I did start my blog hosting on godaddy on a shared server. That was not something I would recommend to anyone due to frequent outages and slow load times.

After a while, I had enough traffic rolling in that I decided to move to a different hosting company that has many different packages to choose from. I selected a cloud server, and they would bounce my blog based on traffic. The way a normal server works is 300 sites are crammed on the same machine without regard for space or web-hog considerations (deal blogs are web-hogs based a lot on data). With the new host I was moved around so I wasn’t sucking up speed from other sites or vice versa. Eventually my traffic got to the point where I needed my own server, which is what I currently use.

So now your have your name, your host and your theme. You need to customize it. If you are graphic designer you can do this yourself. If you are not, you will probably need to pay someone to customize your site. Make sure you own your blog design! And make sure you do pay for the pictures that are used in your design unless you drew everything from your own imagination.

Now that you have set up your site, you can begin to blog.

Tomorrow I will be writing about the “whats” of deal blogging.

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Sometimes I forget that people have not been couponing and rebating forever. I had a question on how to rebate a few weeks ago, and I explained via email and links. I also decided to do a write up in light of the giant pile I did at the beginning of January – I know you all love pictures!

First let me say that I absolutely hate doing rebates (refunds). I do them because I like the checks, but I dislike the work involved. Over the years, some manufacturers have made rebates easier, and some more difficult. There are several very important components to doing rebates:

• Find the forms. This is crucial, because while there are no-form-needed offers, they are few and far between. I keep a list of printable rebate forms that is quite extensive. Your local grocery or drug store may also have forms – either in the aisle by the product, on a product shipper or on a board or tucked away in a box in the office.

• Rebate form organization. If you are new to rebates, really, really need the money, or just hate slippage (the industry term for unredeemed rebates – what!? you didn’t really think the manufacturers wanted to give you your money back, did you?) read this post on rebate form organization. It will help. A lot.

• Read the form The details on the what, whens and how of what you are submitting must be followed to get paid. Here is a great post (if I do say so myself) on how to ring up multiple rebate products on one shopping trip. Remember, some offers want the UPC, some want the cash register tape, some want both. Some want you to print, some want a valid birth date (liquor), some are only valid in certain states. You are never required to give an email address for a rebate. Write “none” in that spot or use a spam email. I do the same for phone number, writing “none” when asked.

• Purchase the products. I keep a list of what products I need in order to redeem current rebates I am interested in.

• Mail on time. You will receive a “box closed” submission returned to you if you mail outside of the last postmark date or form expiration date (some forms only list one or the other).

• Make copies of your submissions. Read this post for why you should make copies.

And I am also listing this post about satisfaction guarantees for you fence sitters.

Let me show you how the rebate-procrastinator does a lot of rebates at one time:

I lay everything out and start matching up CRTs, UPCs and forms.

This is what a UPC + CRT look like.

I always cross out my card ids and my credit card information. Better safe than sorry in my opinion.

Since I write out all my forms and envelopes at one time, I paper clip everything to the forms so nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

And finally I have a nice stack of rebates to go out. Many require you to fill out even the envelope by hand, so read the fine print careful.

Why do I bother? That little stack will return over $200 to my pocket!

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Not a week goes by where I don’t receive a few email asking for help with beginning a blog. Most of the folks have been reading Coupons, Deals and More, learned how to coupon, and now want to blog themselves.

This either means they think I am doing a crappy job and they can do a lot better, or they feel that the field is not super saturated and there is room for their voice.

I am going to go with the latter as it makes me feel better.

If you want to deal blog (or coupon blog if you prefer) to make money, forget it. Do not under any circumstance start any type of blog if you are not doing so to share – be it share your experiences, your expertise, your stories about Aunt Thelma and Cousin Bob – whatever it is, it needs to be about giving some part of you away for free. If money is your primary motivation, don’t even start.

Why, you may ask? Simple. Most bloggers, even deal bloggers, never make a dime of profit. When I started blogging after many, many years on forums, I had an affiliate background. There is so much to learn on how to make money, that it is a good year or so before most bloggers can figure out the “how” of making a buck on a blog. I started making money less than six months in, and that is difficult for most bloggers to do. And by “making money” I mean covering all costs except my time. By year two I was making minimum wage on 40 hours a week – too bad I was working 60-70 hours a week.

If you caught that last sentence, you will notice I wrote “working 60-70 hours a week”. When you start up blogging, like any new start up company, you are the boss. And the sole employee. That means long hours for little monetary reward. If you look at “bigger bloggers” (I consider myself medium sized), they usually have large staffs and seldom write up the deals themselves. They choose a corporate route and basically parlayed their blog name into a company. Do not compare yourself to a “bigger blogger”, and do not expect the same monetary rewards they took years to build to come to you immediately.

It takes years to do what the “bigger bloggers” do, a specific mindset, a willingness to forgo your “voice”, a good PR firm in many cases, excellent SEO and a few other things. If you expect to start blogging tomorrow and get rich next week (or next year), readjust your thinking.

Circling back to why most deal bloggers do not make money – most people do not last six months blogging. It is a lot of work and time. If you have five kids at home, work full time, home school, etc., you quickly realize that, while you would sincerely like to help others, the time spent away from your family is not worth the effort. Your family must come first. So, most blogs do not survive the first six months. And most blogs do not make money before the first year. Since A + B = C, if most blogs begin to make money at year one, and most blogs do not last six months, most blogs do not make money. Please notice the “most”. Nothing is absolute, and it is possible you may buck that trend.

This post is not meant to stop you from blogging or deal blogging – it is meant to make you realize that blogging is a ton of work, not a get-rich-scheme, and not something you quit your day job to begin. Begin blogging because you love to write and want to help folks. If that is a success, then you can transition to professional blogging and all its rewards.

Tomorrow I will give you an idea of the mechanics of beginning to blog, what you need and how you can proceed.

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The Novartis Consumer Health OTC Recall made me remember how many expired OTC medications I had disposed of lately. When we get something for free, we tend to stockpile quite a bit of it; sometimes too much.

While gathering from my stockpile for a donation last month, I discovered how many medicines I had in my H&BA closet, and how many were expired. I had to dispose of a lot of expired OTC medications. Most can be just disposed of into the trash. But for best practices, refer to this handy-dandy FTC Consumer Health Information Booklet: How To Dispose Of Unused Medicines.

Seeing all the meds I disposed of, I have decided to keep no more than two alike medications from now on. While getting it for free is great, donating OTC meds can be difficult – I have a battered women’s shelter that will accept them, but no where else. Even if free, it really is a waste to just toss something in the trash unused. From now on, I will be more judicious in my OTC meds “purchases”.

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It is that time of year again! Make your 2012 prophecies here!!

I predict …

… the world will not end in 2012.

… Rite Aid’s drugstore program will tank.

… stores will continue to pull back on loss leaders.

… coupon usage will surge.

… we will make the best of it regardless of what obstacles are thrown in our path.

What are your 2012 prophecies and predictions!?

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I needed some whipping cream for a recipe, and asked hubby to get some when he went to the store. He told me there was a some in the refrigerator. I said it was heavy cream, and he said “well what’s the difference?”

So I went on a search to find out. It all comes down to the fat content:

• Nonfat Milk: 0%-1%
• 1% Milk: 1%-2%
• 2% Lowfat Milk: 2%
• Whole Milk: 4%
• Half-and-half: 12%-15%
• Light Cream: 18%-30%
This my brother’s guess as to why Tim Horton’s tastes so good. Light Cream is also known as Coffee Cream
• Whipping Cream: 30%-36%
• Heavy Cream: 36%-44%
• Manufacturer’s Cream: 44%+
- This is pourable English double cream (no stabilizers, emulsifiers or preservatives) Upstate Farms does make it. You would have to contact them to see where you can purchase. Same for Byrne Dairy.

FDA milk regulations.

You can use generally heavy cream as whipping cream, but beware of using ultra pasteurized cream as it is heated to a much higher temperature that pasteurized cream. While ultra pasteurized has a longer shelf life, ultra pasteurized is difficult to whip. If you live in a state that only offers pasteurized or ultra pasteurized whipping cream in the dairy department, you might be better off purchasing organic.

Here is a fascinating milk products and production relationship chart.

If you are based in NYS, looking for a particular type of dairy cow product and unable to locate it, you could contact the Cornell cooperative extension for a location near you where to purchase. There is an office in every county in the state.

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