The nature of the internet means that there are always groups of people out there who are passionately discussing almost any given niche with real authoritative knowledge.
To take advantage of this all you need to do is track down the forums and social media communities relating to the topic in question (which you can do easily through Google), sign-up to the forums you find and then search through them to see what people say. If you don’t find the answer you were looking for try posting and asking people for their opinions directly, more often than not forum dwellers are more than happy to help out.
Have a Look Through Related Web Forums
If you are looking for general advice when it comes to saving money online through the use of coupons or other special deals, then there are a few forums I would like to recommend to help get you started:
SavingAdvice – This is an extremely active forum dedicated to frugal living and personal finance matters. If you need advice on how to find the will power to save money, or how to get out of bad debt because you haven’t managed to save in the past, or where to find best deals and promo codes and free shipping codes, this is an excellent place to start out.
WiseBread – This forum has some excellent advise on how to live within a strict budget, as well as providing warnings for a lot of the common scams you see not only on the internet but in the real world as well.
For more money saving forums, you can check this forum search engine called Omgili is the forum search engine which has plenty of forums to search for the related discussions. The search results are real fun and pleasure to scan. See:
How many people took partin the discussion and how many posts there ave been overall;
Look through the actual snippets that mention the word you have searched for.
Thus, search results present a great discussion summary (chances are you won’t even have to go to the actual discussion board):
User Review Sites
Just as there are sites dedicated to bringing to light the latest and greatest scams as they happen, there are also sites dedicated to giving more traditional reviews on goods and services as well. Some of the best sites for finding out what people think about goods available online are:
AlaTest – When looking for reviews on electrical goods one of the best places to find out what people think is AlaTest, a database with over 10million products ranked based on reviews left on popular store sites around the web.
BizRate – An excellent search site which allows you to look up reviews and compare prices on a wide range of different products. BizRate pulls information from all of the most popular (and some of the lesser known) web based stores to help provide an accurate picture as to an items worth, making use of a very easy to understand graphical interface in order to do so.
CNet – Covering a wide range of mostly technology orientated products (both software and hardware), CNet is a system that relies not only on professional editors but on customer reviews as well. Some products even have video reviews and tutorials, which can go into much more detail than the average web based reviews. More often than not my first port of call whenever going to buy something tech related.
Do you leverage user-generated feedback to save money? Please share you tips!
