Posted on December 13, 2008 - by admin

Researching Your Product - OOG 21

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 21 December 13, 2008

++ News -

Gas news - The good news for the economy is that gas is now about $1.66 / gallon. Over 80 or so days it has fallen more than $2.00.

Useful Information -

If you’re wondering when stores may be offering free shipping or need a coupon - make sure that you check this site out.

http://www.freeshipping.org/

++

Saving you Money - Below is a video - which we hope will help you a bit in your product research.

If you like it please don’t hesitate to leave us a comment.

We want to make sure to bookmark things as we go along. First make sure that we have a folder created within our bookmarks – that will make finding things much easier. As you open new pages you will want to open the new page in a tab – again that will make things much easier.

The first step in doing any product research is going to Google. What I’m going to be looking for / researching are camcorders…

There are a few different ways to approach this. If I have plenty of time the first thing you want to do is to check out some forums.

So I would search for camcorder forums. If you’re short on time you can search for

Camcorder reviews (just remember to insert the product you’re researching where I’ve put Camcorder).

Camcorder buying guide.

One thing you’ll want to do as well is to change your search preferences so you get more results on the page. To do that you click on preferences – then make the number of results 50 or 100.

After visiting a few flops – I found one that I liked. If you had the time you would post something that would detail what you were looking for. Or you could ask in the forums what are some good sites to learn about the item you’re researching. BUT before you ask you want to make sure to use the search function.. after all nothing is as aggravating to frequent forum goers, and that is a repeated question of a few days ago. You can find the search box here. It is usually a link or a big box. Don’t forget that if you’re having trouble finding something you can use your browser search function. For firefox that is ctrl – F .One thing I can tell by the number of posts, is that Canon and Sony are big sellers.

Make sure to save good sites that you find in your favorites – otherwise you’ll just have to find them again.

I have subscriptions to a ton of different magazines. During the past few months they’ve had camera reviews. Clip those pages and put them into a folder where you can find them. Also the magazines listed some good review sites. One thing with review sites is many of them are spammy and only want to make money from advertising… so there views can be prejudiced.

We’re going to go back to Google and search for camcorder buyers guide.

You want to find two or three sites to help you with your research.

Couple of notes –

1. Especially if you’re wanting recent technology, you’ll want recent information.

2. A few sites I’ve had good luck with are about.com / Yahoo / CNET / Consumer Reports.

After you plunder around in these sites you should have an idea of the features that you want.

Go back to the spreadsheet that you made and include those features.

After much browsing I really like the camcorder.info site. Now you want to find at least two or three models that you like.

I like the Sony HDR-S12 and the Canon HF 11.

On Tuesday we’ll work on Finding some coupons.

Here are the tentative dates for the remaining articles.

3. Finding Coupons - December 16th
4. Comparison shopping online. - December 20th
5. Comparison shopping Off line. January 3rd
6. Buy it. January 10th

Fun with your family -

This is fun for the whole family - http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/

You get to turn you and whoever you happen to have a picture of into a group of crazy elfs.

You can even send the results to your friends and family.

You can make some really cool snowflakes - check them out here.

http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/index.html

We hope you have a wonderful day!