Here is an email I got from one of our readers with a question that i wanted to pass along to everyone. Please feel free to respond with any advice you may have.
Kelli,
Why are people willing to pay $20.00 a month for Savings Angel and Grocery Game? What are they doing that sets them apart? What is the difference between the 100's of coupon bloggers making a few bucks a day and these sites?
Calvin
My guess is name recognition.
ReplyDeleteGrocery Game has been around longer than many coupon bloggers have been active. Just to throw a date out there ... I did a report in Jan 2008 for my blog with the pros and cons of that service. How many of the typical coupon blogs last even a year?
The Grocery Game hostess has also written a book that can be found in many public libraries.
Savings Angel does a lot of promotion. I received multiple PR pitches from that company in late spring / early summer 2010. I don't remember if the initial contact was to me as a coupon blogger or to me as a newspaper reporter.
Savings Angel also was the coupon class presenter at the 2011 Michigan International Women's Show in metro Detroit.
I have explained to my readers how programs like that work, but I'm not promoting any service that relies on a coupon database. I teach a DIY method.
Reason: databases that attempt to match coupons to supermarket sales will not be accurate for my local readers. There are too many variations involved with overlapping newspaper and supermarket districts.
If you live in Monroe MI, one could easily use an Ohio newspaper coupon at a store following the Michigan supermarket flier, or vice versa, and have no idea that's what you just did. That's too complicated for a database to follow -- even if you understood what was going on.