Buzzillions Blogs » shammara

We Want to Hear from You!

shammara — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:14:50 +0000

The last couple days we reached out to BabyCheapSkate, a popular mom blogger and long time Buzzillions user, to hold a giveaway on behalf of Buzzillions. We decided to give away two $25 cash prizes to two random people who write a comment on how they would use Buzzillions, what they think of it, what could be improved, and so forth. Reading all the comments has been really exciting for us, and it’s great how much time people spent exploring the site and telling us how they’ll use it for their new baby, or holiday shopping, etc.

You can see the contest here, and you can even comment for a chance to win because it doesn’t end until Monday!

Our second giveaway is being held on SisterlySavings and that contest is still running too .

We love giveaways!

5 Unique Ideas for Halloween Baby Costumes

shammara — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:32:46 +0000

The Lobster Baby:

“..an adorable costume for Halloween. My old is going as the Little Mermaid and My 3 month son is Sebastian.” - Ellie and Eli’s Mommy from Charleston, SC.

Yoda Baby Costume

“With a big brother being Darth Vader, This was a perfect match!!”

- Sarah from Jacksonville, FL

Turtle

“My son is 6 months old and we hope that by Halloween he will be crawling, so the turtle with the shell will be perfect.” - Amanda from Lexington, South Carolina

Baby Duckling

“We added some orange tights to look like the duck legs. She was so cute! The costume is very soft and great quality.” - Angie from Columbia, SC

Little Caterpillar

“Daddy is going to be a the mushroom from Alice in Wonderland and she will be the caterpillar on the mushroom (I’m Alice).” - Flagstaff Mama from Flagstaff, AZ

More baby costume ideas and reviews on Buzzillions

The New Neutrogena Wave: A lot of Hype but Little to Show

shammara — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:22:18 +0000

Like myself there are a lot of women (and men) try out new skin care products that make bold claims of reducing acne, preventing dryness, eliminating wrinkles, and so on. The Neutrogena Wave Power-Cleanser for instance has been widely advertised for a few months now, and it really did seem appealing with its creative design and supposed power to revolutionize your skin cleansing routine.

This time I held some patience and waited a few months to see what early adopters would actually end up saying. I’m really not surprised that a lot of people went online and swooped it up (it’s pretty cheap at $14.99), but the 72 reviews so far share a pretty bleak story.

Along with straight out disappointed buyers saying they want their money back, others elaborated on how the product doesn’t foam like it claims, and many even said it caused breakouts rather than diminished them! Don’t you just hate when a skin product causes acne when the one that’s the one thing you’re desperately trying to get rid of.

Disappointing to say the least, but I’m just going to stick to the basics and use the tried and true products highly reviewed on Buzzillions that never let down.

ShopSmart Names 7 Sites That Can Save You Thousands

shammara — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:13:03 +0000

It feels like every day now we’re hearing about another bank going under or getting acquired, mass job losses, and the Fed spending our hard earned money to “save” the financial markets. While we don’t have much control over these economic disasters, ShopSmartMag.org published 7 sites that can help individuals spend wisely and take control of their own personal finances.

ShopSmart magazine, a product of Consumer Union who also publishes ConsumerReports.org, named Buzzillions as the top User Reviews site, as it can “help you to find the best products and avoid the worst.”

Among other sites, ShopSmarter also listed Ebates.com for rebates, RetailMeNot.com for coupon codes that actually work, Freeshipping.org for free-shipping coupons, amongst several others that you can read about here.

If you’re a ShopSmart magazine subscriber, watch out for the article in their November 2008 issue.

Mom Bloggers review Buzzillions

shammara — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:10:29 +0000

Recently we’ve had two widely regarded mom bloggers review their experience using Buzzillions. MomAdvice who writes helpful money saving tips, wrote a very flattering review about how she uses Buzzillions and how it helped her find the right GPS system.

MomReviews also writes reviews on a wide range of products she uses, which is especially why she found Buzzillions to be unique for having reviews written by real people. She highlighted all the features we love seeing catch on with people, like the affinity recommendation wizard, review snapshot, and of course the discovery of highly reviewed products you never would have known about otherwise. You can read her review on us here.

3 Web Tools for Smarter Spending

shammara — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:20:01 +0000

1. Mint.com is a highly addictive money management site. You can quickly see where you’re spending, where you can save, and where you can earn higher interest.

Mint is by far the coolest way to track your spending online. It’s is completely free, and it takes about 5 minutes to import your bank accounts, after which it spurts out a clean pie chart of your spending trends. I had no idea until I signed up for Mint that I spend about 20% more than people in SF eating out at restaurants, or that my most frequent merchant is Trader Joes . There are all kinds of interesting nuggets you would never know about your spending habits! You can see how hundreds of Twitter users are benefiting from Mint.com as well.

It also showed me banks that would give me 2-3% higher interest than I’m currently getting! I don’t know anybody who has the patience to purchase and use Microsoft Money and all those other bland financial software tools, but Mint is sure to attract the masses as they continue to make financial tracking and budgeting fun .

2. Gas Prices from MSN Auto : Type in your zip code and find the cheapest gas locations in your area, the average gas price, and the highest price. It’s also updated every night. The difference between the cheapest and most expensive gas in our zip code in SF is 70 cents! You’d save a good $14 on a full 20 gallon tank of gas.

3. Read reviews on Buzzillions of course . Chances are you’ve bought something for a great price, but it just didn’t cut it. Eeither it broke, or the quality was so bad it was unusable, or it just didn’t meet your expecatations. Reading reviews from actual owners of the product on Buzzillions can help you get the best bang for the buck. You never know afterall, since even the best brands out there don’t always produce the best products .

3 Popular Products You Should Avoid

shammara — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:16:54 +0000

As I was browsing through Buzzillions last night, I found a bunch of products made by top brands and was pretty surpised to see how poorly rated some of these were! It goes to show that even if a product is made by a brand you know and trust, they can still be huge disappointments.

1. Black & Decker 12 Cup Coffee Maker: 2.4 stars/ 5

Although Black & Decker is a well known and trusted brand, this particular coffe maker is a definite bust! Several people said it ended up leaving “a counter top covered in hot coffee,” and that this model is terrible compared to previous models since they’ve “finally cheapened it to the point of not being usable.”

2. Kodak EasyShare M883 Digital Camera: 2.8 stars/ 5

Even Kodak doesn’t always get everything right! Although it looks pretty sleek, the “picture quality is digusting .” Also, don’t plan on taking pictures indoors since the “camera is not usable in low light areas,” and pictures turn out “grainy.”

3. Magellan Crossover GPS Unit: 3.1 stars/ 5

Reading the reviews, this Magellan GPS system has pissed a lot of people off. I mean, if you had to “spend another $150+ to add the software to make it do what it says it does.” A few people weren’t even satsified with the basic necessities of GPS system as it “responds slowly, plans poorly, has multiple misspelled road names, including freeway names, and is grossly out of date with the maps. ”

Disproportionate blog coverage

shammara — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:41:30 +0000

The other day Robert Scoble wrote a pretty good post about how some companies like Twitter gets a disproportionate amount of blog coverage compared to other companies like Meebo (who has a significant amount more engagement and traffic than Twitter) and is under represented.

His very realistic theory was that Twitter is a tool most bloggers actively use, thus have a strong bias to cover the company frequently, while Meebo isn’t a tool most technology centric writers use. The disappointing thing about this truth is that readers don’t get a diversity of startup and technology news, since the top bloggers end up covering the same story about every single (often uninteresting) move Twitter makes.

Recently we got coverage on VentureBeat “PowerReviews aims to become the AdSense of product reviews” which highlighted our goal to be the OS for retailers of every size to collect customer reviews. It got a decent amount of pickup, but it was definitely no $999.99 for “I am Rich” iPhone app story.

What do you think about the news, analysis, and coverage of technology in the blogosphere?

Google Insights for Search

shammara — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:07:07 +0000

On Tuesday Google Insights launched, a tool you can use to “See what the world is searching for.” I played around with different keywords to realize that there are so many possibilities with this tool for marketers, advertisers, and any company with a desire to understand search behavior to choose advertising messaging, seasonal planning, follow product/brand trends, and on and on.

A great example on their “How can I use Google Insights for Search?” page, they showed how while “fuel efficiency” is a growing concern for people, “car safety” gets a significant amount of interest which an auto advertiser would want to include in advertising campaigns:

I can think of many ways for Buzzillions to take advantage of this tool from buying keywords, to messaging, and seasonal features in the future..back to school is right around the corner!

A Highlight of Our Approach to Affiliate Marketing

shammara — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:31:50 +0000

Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip wrote a great post today highlighting our success metrics which helped us win the Innovative Publisher of the Year Award.

Take a read to see some interesting stats about our best performing affiliate partners including OneStepAhead, BiggerBras, REI, and Overstock (in that order), our conversion rate, and our performance rank in affiliate networks.