Coupons You Need to Start Your Own Blog

It is a familiar scenario to almost any Internet shopper. You visit an online merchant to buy something. You add the desired items to your shopping cart and just about when you are about to enter your credit card information or enter your Paypal password, you notice a small box that says: “Enter coupon code here”.

How do you react? If you don’t have a coupon, how do you find one? Do you care to find one at all? Sadly, most people do not spare a few minutes of their time to try to find a coupon online in order to save a few bucks. Most of them do not know that there are sites out there that provide discounts for the product they are buying.

I used to be “coupon” ignorant, too. I thought that promotion coupons are hard to find. I thought that I needed to know an insider or call a rep who would give me the “secret” code, if I begged enough.

While discount deals are not available for every product at any given time, thankfully, savings discounts do exist for some of products and services that bloggers most commonly use. Here are a few of the neediest coupons that any blogger or website owner should take advantage of.

Coupons for Saving on Your Domain Name

A domain name is a pre-requisite to develop a site. Admittedly, GoDaddy.com is the king of domain names. According to Wikipedia, Godaddy is the largest in the list of domain name registrars, four times the size of its closest competitor Enom.com. It is impressive to think that they were managing over 45 million domain names in 2010!

The cost of a domain name ranges from $10 to $10 million or even more, depending on its commerciality. Business.com was sold for $7.5 million in 1999, but Business985.com is still available today and costs only $11.99.

If you decide to buy your domain name from Godaddy, make sure you use a coupon code. For .COM domains use code FAN3 and for .NET domains use YUP749 to save 35%. For .ORG use FAN749 to save 50%. There are many sites that make discount codes available for domain names. I know that Brian’s site Longest.com and Alex’s site YouLoveCoupons.com have always updated Godaddy coupon codes available that work.

Coupons for Saving on Website Hosting

A website is nothing more than a collection of files (images, text, video, etc), like the ones you routinely create and store in your computer. A hosting service provides space to store these files and internet connectivity to make these files accessible via the World Wide Web.

Bluehost and Hostgator are my favorite hosting companies. All 7 domains I own are hosted with them. What I like about Bluehost is that their administration tool (cpanel) is very functional. Hostgator provices quality hosting, too. Their 24/7 customer service and the professionalism and expertise of their technical support team gives them a strong edge over their competitors. At the time of this writing, coupons for Bluehost are not available. To save on Hostgator use this code: SPRING. You will receive a 25% price reduction.

Coupons for Bringing Traffic to Your Site

Google Adwords is the fastest and easiest way to bring targeted traffic and potential customers to your site. Via the use of text ads, Adwords directly connects your site with people who are looking for your product or service using the desired keywords.

Unlike free traffic from organic listings, traffic from Adwords is costly. How do you think Google made $28 billion in 2010?

How can you save on Adwords? Many organizations offer discounts on Adwords. The most common savings discount is a $50 or a $100 Adwords credit. For example, you will get one once you set up a hosting account with Bluehost or Hostgator. WordPress, too, offers an Adwords promotion to new bloggers.

Google itself offers Adwords promotional coupons to both advertizing professionals and individuals. This is in addition to the Google $50 credit in free advertizing you get once you set your account with Adwords. So, for example, a few days ago, I received an email from Google saying:

“We’re sorry to see that you’ve stopped advertising with Google, and we want to help you use AdWords to grow your business. We’re giving you $100 in free advertising, To redeem your $100 credit, type 5DVA-4HVZ-SA62-4F6L-49E2 in the “Redeem code” section of your account.”

The code expired end of February.

Coupons for Securing Your Site’s Files

Do you ever want to lose your website? Of course not! While it sounds like a ridiculous question, it’s not if you consider that some people do not back up their sites’ files because they rely on their hosting company to do so. Well, none of the webhosting companies bear any responsibility if they somehow lose your data. This is after all stated in the Terms and Conditions.

Backing you website’s files is very important. The question is, where do you store the files? In your own computer? What if the hard drive fails? You are out of business. You need to use a trusted back up service like Mozy or Norton. You can save 10% and get up to 3 months free using a Mozy discount coupon. For Norton 360 (Norton’s most popular product), use code CPNCODE25 to save 25%.

I believe every blogger should take advantage of the above deals. Do you have any coupon codes to share that can save us money on building our blogs?