Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Best Buys – product and service shopping comparisons and reviews

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When you are thinking of purchasing an item do you try to do a little research before you decide which brand or model you’ll buy? What about when you are about to sign a contract for a service such as one for a mobile phone, credit card or even something like an online dating service?

I certainly try to take the time to read a few reviews and or compare products when I’m thinking of paying a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for something. I want the best product or best service that my money can buy. I’m sure you do too.

That’s why I like the Best Buys website. You can read reviews and compare prices for a variety of products ranging from appliances, audio, cameras, computers, electronics, games, gifts, movies, music, office products, software, telephones, televisions and several other items.

One thing that I found kind of interesting about the site was that when I decided to search for a specific item the search box listed matching or similar search terms as I typed. I didn’t even have to type out the full product name as it guessed almost immediately what I was about to search for – now that was cool.

I had actually gone there to do belated research on the Canon EOS 30D digital camera. As you know I already purchased my new digital SLR camera about a month and a half ago and on this rare occasion I didn’t do much research before hand. However, every time I go looking for product comparisons and reviews for the camera that I purchased I always discover good reviews. Best Buys has 9 reviews for my camera and almost all of them give the camera five out of five stars. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that I purchased a camera that others feel is a good product.

I’ll certainly be going back to doing research before I buy in the future though. I lucked out on my camera, but I’d hate to end up purchasing a lemon just because I didn’t compare a products features, pros,and cons before buying!

If you decide to visit the site you should take a look at Best Buys Comparison Reviews. You can read comparisons on this page of various services. For example it’s said that some of the best and most popular antivirus programs that you can purchase are McaFee and Norton Antivirus. Well at Bestbuys.com you can read a comparison of the two products and find out which product has the best computer security features, best performance and which has the best support as well as finding out which product bestbuys.com thinks is the best buy for your money.

Likewise you can compare services such as Blockbuster versus NetFlix, or if you want to get internet phone service you can compare Vonage with SunRocket and so on. You can compare all kinds of services such music cd clubs, online dating services, satellite TV services, high speed internet services and so on. I’m sure that some of these comparisons will be quick helpful.

Some of the reviews that I’ve just listed above, such as perhaps Blockbuster versus Netflix also has what Bestbuys.com calls “Fine Print Revealed” reviews where you can read information that marketers might not necessarily openly reveal to their clients prior to their signing up for the service. If you want to find out what’s behind the Blockbuster Total Access marketing campaign do visit the service comparison page.

The Fine Print Revealed reviews can sometimes be eye openers and they are worth visiting the site to read if you are interested in comparing particular services before you sign a service contract.

Hopefully bestbuys.com will continue to add more Fine Print Revealed articles to their site. Since I live in Canada a few of their comparison articles aren’t relevant as we don’t necessarily have the same service companies here in Canada as there are in the US. I’m not complaining of course, of the 15 direct comparison articles that I found 11 are services that I might use at some point.

Overall I really like this site and I’ve already bookmarked it. I’m certain I’ll visit Bestbuys.com the next time I’m thinking of making a substantial purchase. The site is very user friendly. You can use the search box at the top of the page to easily find a product or service to read reviews on or to compare features and prices, or you can click on any of the tabs at the top of each page to get to any of the major category sections of the site. Remember there’s over 40 million products and services listed on BestBuys.com!

BestBuys.com also has a weekly newsletter to which you might want to subscribe. The newsletter lists best buys, freebies, and contest information. In fact, speaking of contests, when you refer friends and they subscribe to the newsletter you’ll have a chance to win a monthly prize of $100. I know I’d like a chance to win $100 so if you’d like me to refer you to the newsletter just let me know.

Don’t forget to bookmark BestBuys.com so you can comparison shop before you buy!

Social network sites take a chunk of my time each day

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Did you know that I spend perhaps as much as an hour a day going through all my “friend” invites and other messages that come in from social networks like Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, Facebook, and Bumpzee?

I haven’t actually kept track of how many friend requests come in each day or how long it really does take so my “hour” is an estimate, but I think it’s fairly accurate. When someone makes a friend request or joins my neighborhood I visit the social network site and then I often visit the person who’s just made me a “friend”‘s blog as well. So, yeah, it can take some time.

How much of your time do you think social networking takes you each day or week?

Thoof is a great way to gain visitors to your site and measure your posts popularity

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Have you joined Thoof.com yet? It’s a site where you can go to read news articles, view photographs and videos and or posts from websites and blogs.

Members may submit their stories to Thoof when they’ve created a post that they’d like to share with the world.

Submitting your stories is actually a great way to drive traffic to your site. I know a number of bloggers who have been using Thoof regularly since they discovered it, and they’ve said that they get new visitors every day. There’s even a Thoofit button that you can drag to your bookmarks that makes it even easier to submit a story or article that interests you from any site on the web. You can find that button on the submit it page.

What’s more, when you visit Thoof and search for a particular type of story, photo or video the site will remember the choices that you’ve made so that the next time that you visit stories, photos and videos of a similar nature will be on the front page when you sign in. In this way Thoof can become your own personalized news site.

Thoof has recently added a new feature to their site. When you submit a story you’ll get a ThoofRank badge that you can add to your site. This badge will measure your stories popularity on Thoof.

I think this is a great idea. Other than looking at our sites stats or how many comments we get on a particular post we have very few ways to measure the popularity of the various posts we create. Now, when you submit a story to Thoof and use the ThoofRank badge you’ll have another way to measure how interesting your story is to others.

I think I’m going to start using Thoof more often. I mean other bloggers have said they are getting traffic to their site from the stories they’ve submitted and they’ve also said they like the stories they are reading on the site. It’s a great way to keep up with other bloggers.

I’ll start by submitting this story. It’ll also be a great way to test out the new ThoofRank badge. I wonder just how popular this story might be?

So who’s going to join me at Thoof?

The importance of search engine optimization

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I read a lot of forums, blogs and websites and one thing that strikes me time and time again is how little most people know about natural search engine optimization. The real shocker for me is that it’s not always those who are new to being a website owner that seem to not know what SEO is, but people who have been blogging or maintaining sites for years.

I believe that search engine optimization begins with the purchase of your domain name. If you are writing a site about bikes it’s important to have the word bike in your domain name. The search engines will like that and might give your site a higher standing on search engine results. After all the whole point of optimizing our sites for search engines is so that people doing searches can find us easily.

If your your site comes up on page 10 of a Google search results page it’s unlikely that you’ll have many visitors. However if you consistently pick appropriate keywords for your sites articles, article titles, page titles, site titles and even domain names you’ll have a good chance that your site will be found on the first page of search engine results.

My sites tend to do well in search engine rankings because I try to use keywords in my articles that describe the topic I’m writing about and I also try to use a descriptive title for my posts.

I shake my head when I visit a blog and see a great article about a specific topic yet the title is some off the wall line like “Yaba daba do what a day!”.

If you really aren’t sure how to optimize your site for search engines you might want to hire a search engine optimization company to help you. They can take a look at your site and do a consultation. Perhaps they’ll give you a price quote that contains a list of what they’d do to optimize your site.

Many search engine optimization services such as the one I’ve linked to above, submitawebsite.com, have information about SEO techniques that you can begin to use on your own to better your standings on search engines.

As I said earlier a SEO company will also offer a number of SEO services that you might want to use to promote your site just as text link ads, optimizing your site for search engine placement, pay per click services and management and many other services that could help your site reach number one on in the search engine results.

If you don’t have time to optimize your site for search engines on your own do look into the services of a SEO company. It’s worth it if you want to boost your traffic.

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