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Since the pre-Internet days, businesses had used coupons as a marketing tool to drive sales and create customer loyalty. Consumers enjoyed savings to their purchases by using cut-out coupons from newspaper and/or magazines. With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce explosion, shopping online had become a way of life for many people, and the use of coupons had shifted online too!

Who doesn’t love a good deal, whether you are shopping online or offline? The idea of coupons has always been a love/hate relationship for many consumers. In the past, you needed to find them in newspapers, magazines, etc., cut them out in order to use them. As we do not enjoy the power of web search at our finger tips back then, this “search-cut-use” process often took up more time than it was worth.

But now that we live in a digital world, using online coupons is as simple as typing in a code while checking out of your favorite online retailer. Most of the e-commerce portals have ongoing discounts going at their sites, and apart from these there are sites exclusively meant for distribution of online discount coupons. Sites like UltimateCoupons.com offer tons of great online coupons for hundreds of online merchants to help you get free shipping or dollars off your regular purchases.

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Another crazy October weekend had rolled in and it’s time for another round of weekly review.

• Let’s start off by looking at some ways to relax and to enjoy blogging. When you are happy you are more likely to create higher quality content. If you are having a tough time to find what to blog about, maybe some of the tips offered by Becky of PreBlogging dot com in her Photo Montage will help you find your blogging inspirations.

• Talking about writing higher quality content, what works for me may not be the case for you. Quality is so subjective, powerful content is really in the eyes of the beholder. Bobby of Revillian dot com offered a few tips on How to Write Content that Makes A Difference For People. Are your content making a difference in your readers’ lives?

• For those of us who blogs about making money online, our ultimate aim is to achieve high a click-through rate from whatever killer content we can churn out and hit our conversion goals. Susan Suarez revealed her own observation on how to increase click rates. Click here to read about her secret!

Enough of hows and whys of writing content that makes a difference or lead your readers to an action. Yesterday, while surfing the blogosphere, I chance upon two very creative bloggers who defy convention by creating powerful visual content with minimum words on their blogs. Their blogs really exemplify and put into perspective the meaning of “a picture tells a thousand words“. Let me introduce their blogs here so that you too can enjoy their creative works:

• First is a Singapore girl who calls herself and blogs at The Bitter Stickgirl. The hand-drawn sketches in every posts are so simple yet powerfully conveys her thoughts and ramblings stated in the post title. Most of her posts have no typewritten words, except one or two of them with 2 - 3 sentences.

• Next is a 5-year old kindergarten kid who blogs using voice recognition software (that’s what written on the blog header) at Being Five. It is essentially a comic strip blog and provides some light-hearted moments for me after devouring all the heavy stuff on SEO, SEM, making millions online etc. Enjoy them!

Update: This contest was reported to be a SCAM. My initial thought was to delete this post, but decided to leave it with an update to warn my readers, but with the content strike through and all links disabled.

Getting quality one way backlinks to your blogs are very important in your Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization efforts. But where can we get such quality links from? Should we buy or “rent” them? Submit our blogs to link directories? Or should we trade links with fellow bloggers?

Darin Carter of Search Engine Marketing shows us 3 options on how you can build your incoming links. Darin has been involved in Internet Marketing for over 9 years and freely shares his experience in search engine marketing techniques on his blog. I have been a regular reader of his blog since so long ago and his recent change of blog design certainly brought the user experience and visual treats to new heights!

Being a tech geek himself, Darin is renowned for giving away the latest generation tech toys in his previous blog contests. He is at it again, this time giving away a free iPhone! This contest Co-Sponsored by his new Search Marketing consulting firm Innovative SEM, LLC.

There are 6 different ways to enter the contest and you can increase your odds of winning by taking advantage of all 6 options. The Contest will end Monday October 15th 2007 at Midnight EST and the Winner of the Free Apple iPhone will be announced on Tuesday October 16th 2007!

Have you ever wonder what kind of blogger you are? Now you can reveal your blogging persona by taking Professor Blogstein’s 7 simple questions. I took this fun quiz and here’s my badge of honor.

Go take the quiz and find out what kind of blogger you are.

October started off with a pleasant surprise for this blog and me. My sneaky friend Prija, who is the master of game theory and had tons of guerrilla marketing tactics up his sleeves, had nominated me as one of the 2007 Blogger Rookie of The Year.

I felt honored to be among the company of talented bloggers. This is indeed a great link bait for BloggingTheMovie.com. If you haven’t cast your vote for your favourite rookie blogger of 2007, head over there to exercise your blogging rights. Voting ends 12/31/07. Read the rest of this entry »