Tips to Save Money on Grocery Shopping

Time to think about saving money in any possible way, because

1) “every penny counts while we are still in recession”, and

2) considering there will be more members joining my family later this year.

The Simple Dollar shares a tip that I can simply do while doing the grocery shopping. It reveals a fact he discovered that

on some products, the higher volume version often has a higher cost per unit than the smaller version.

He then went ahead and did some research to find why, and listed 10 products we should study carefully before going ahead buying a bulk.

• Tuna fish
• Ketchup
• Canned beans
• Salad & cooking oil
• Dishwashing detergent
• Laundry detergent
• American cheese
• Canned vegetables
• Jams and jellies
• Syrups

Very interesting find. I will sure think twice when thinking of buying these items in bulk next time when I do the grocery shopping.

Grocery Shopping 101: Qty Surcharges and 10 products to Watch out [the simple dollar]

7 Mistakes You Can Simply Avoid When You Write

I came across this post on Copyblogger while going through his feed today. Reading through the post kind reminded me one of the reasons that made me to start a blog a few years ago, which was basically to improve my writing skill while making my own web logs for my daily working and learning experience. It’s proved be a good one that have helped me to archived these two initial goals at some point.

To be honest, these 7 mistakes are quite common mistakes I see on the various posts I follow everyday. It’s definitely worth a post here emphasizing an easy way to improve the quality of the post by simply avoiding these 7 mistakes.

Mistake #1: loose vs. lose

If your pants are too loose, you might lose your pants.

Mistake #2: Me, Myself, and I

Many consider Chris a punk, but I myself tolerate him. Which brings me to ask myself, why?

Mistake #3: Different than vs. Different from

This vase is different from the one I have, but I think mine is better than this one.

Mistake #4: Improper Use of the Apostrophe

Mistake #5: Parallelism

When writing a list of items in paragraph form, this is even more crucial, and failing to stay in parallel can result in confusion for readers and scorn from English majors.

Mistake #6: i.e. vs. e.g.

i.e. is a way of saying “in other words.” while e.g. is used before giving specific examples.

Mistake #7: Could of, Would of, Should of

Please don’t do this:

I should of gone to the baseball game, and I could of, if Billy would of done his job.

Instead,

I should have gone to the baseball game, and could have, if Billy had done his job.

For more tips on avoiding grammatical mistakes, check out Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb.

Do you make these 7 mistakes when you write? [copyblogger]

Go Rockets Go

Who would have thought this Rockets and Lakers series can go this far, especially when both Mutombo and You Ming were already out?? Hey, no problem, they have beaten down Lakers twice now since Yao Ming’s out. Why they can’t do it again on Game 7?

So, Go Rockets Go. This is the best changes going to the conference final, ever!!

Publish Blog to Amazon Kindle

Amazon has opened a door to all blogs over the world allowing them to publish their blogs over to their flagship product Kindle. Previously, it was a closed program that only opens to the large well established blogs.

Currently, the program is still in beta, which is a fast track self publishing tool to upload your blog for sale on Kindle store, and open to everyone. However, in order to get paid, you will have to either have a US residential address or a US bank account. Not bad to a Canadian since it’s pretty easy for a Canadian to open a US checking account.

All you need to do is to register an account and submit your blog RSS feed to the Kindle store. Amazon will format your content for the delivery on the Kindle. Be ready with images of your blog’s screenshot, and masthead/banner/logo during the submission.

I went ahead and got my geeks talk blog submitted and published within 30 minutes, and now it’s in the waiting list for be approved. Currently, it shows “not available yet” on the product page.

So what would it look like on Kindle? During the submission you can preview your blog to see how it will look like on Kindle. To be honest, pretty ugly, but that’s ok.

Will this new money making mode work? I don’t know but my gut feeling is who wants to pay to read the stuff that is already free on the Internet. Well, since it’s still at the very early stage, it’s too soon to nail the deal. And here is John’s opinion that seems to summarize it pretty well at the moment.

Subscription revenue will be divided 70/30, with 70% going to Amazon and 30% going to you. Subscription price is solely determined by Amazon. I don’t know how Amazon prices their blogs but the average rate seems to be $1.99 per month. Even if you doubt anyone would subscribe to your blog, it’s still a good idea to sign up and get listed on one of the biggest websites in the world. The free exposure can’t hurt!

And yes, “The free exposure can’t hurt” in any way, so go hurry to give it a try.

Kindle Publishing for Blogs

Free Personal Finance eBook from the simple dollar

If you are in the same stage as mine who is hungry hunting money anywhere, don’t under-estimate the personal finance part the same time. The last thing you probably want to do is to waste the money you work hard to make in a way that you don’t even know how they are wasted. So thanks to the simple dollar for sharing this awesome free eBook on his blog with tons of ideas in it.

“Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on Just One Page” is a 49 page personal finance book that weaves together most of my favorite ideas on personal finance and a lot of other goodies into one document. I’m making it available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, which means that this document is free – you can send it to your friends, put it up on your website, or print it out.

And here it is, thanks to the simple dollar again, and enjoy.

Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page – Download My Personal Finance Book for Free! [the simple dollar]

Auto-Twittering through Friendfeed

Friendfeed is very feed friendly because it can be a central place that integrates all the feeds you subscribe together. Not only that, it can also automate things like sending tweets to twitter whenever you have new feeds coming in, which is very nice for both time-saving and marketing.

Friendfeed offers 57 services you can subscribe so far, pretty much covers all popular social network websites, blogs, twitter, flickr, delicious, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. etc. you name it. However, wandering around there is usually quite time consuming. I won’t suggest you go there too often unless you are a social media expert or enthusiasm. It’s a nice place for marketing but only merely ok for learning. I currently have 5 services added in my friendfeed account, including my blogs, bookmarks, feed readers, and twitter. I also set it up so new posts posted on my blogs and items shared through my Google Reader will be tweeted automatically to twitter. So far, it works great!

Setting up auto-twitter is a little tricky though. There is no obvious option in user setting for that. You will have to go a little route to get friendfeed authorized in your twitter account first in order to get the option shown up in user settings page.

First, in your friendfeed main page, click Post button near at the top, which turns on the cc Twitter option next to it.

Then, click Twitter link, which opens Twitter authorize page in a new window. Put your twitter username and password in, and click the bit Allow button.

Once it’s done, you will find the Twitter publishing preferences becomes available in your friendfeed settings. Clicking the Settings link next to your avatar will get you the page similar to the one below.

And once you see that, it’s all set. You can now enjoy the time saved from this automated process.

Happy friendfeeding, and twittering!

Now my site ranked back to nothing

I had wondered why this site ranked 3 already in such a short time, and now, as of today, the mystery seems to have solved after it’s been corrected back to nothing.

It was still ranked as 3 yesterday but went to 0 this morning when I checked. I believe that’s something to do with the Google Webmaster Tools I set for this website yesterday. Once all data were got indexed properly in Google’s database they finally realized and corrected the wrong PR they assigned to mine earlier.

It makes more sense that way, and I was actually glad that it’s all got corrected. I rather prefer a natural, generic PR than a mystery only looked good number, because you don’t know when you will lose it.

Anyway, since I am back to the ground, it’s time to start building it up.

Life would be better without being a Canucks fan

All Canucks fans probably would totally agree with what I said in the title after watching a painful game that ended another Canucks journey to the Stanley Cup. What an ugly game to watch! Where were the so-called super stars when we need them the most? Why this so-called defensive-minded team had so many turnovers in the 3rd period that gave up 4 goals in 10 shot attempts? Why a so-called more experienced team acted no better or worse than a rookie?

My wife kept and still keeps telling me stop being a fan of any kind sports, especially the home town team. She simply thinks there are just many other things in life that are better and worth than being a *stupid* sports fan. Well, you know what, I have to admit that she’s right. She’s been right since from the first day I met her. But well, sadly, I am hopeless.

So what hope will we have being a hopeless Canucks fan? There will always be next year but before we do that let’s look back. It’s just plain shame being a hockey town without even winning the cup once in their history. Shame to death. We need a better hockey team, a team that can win the cup, a team at least that

• has the winning heart. If you still think they have it, stop it. A team that has the winning heart with them wouldn’t have given that many turnovers after leading 3 times in a game.
• has the leadership. Relying on a goalie is not going to bring us the cup. We need Ovechkin, Crosby, Malkin type of super stars who can carry the team and win the game. We don’t even have any player that is at the same level as Patrick Kane. Look at the 3rd goal he scored, just beautiful.
• has more young skilled willing to fight guys than aged experienced but soft guys.  You know and get what I meant.

Let’s keep hoping and wish life will be better, a lot better the same time next year with being a Canucks fan.

The Secrets to the Success

John Chow, my role model on internet marketing, shared an interview he and Shoemaker conducted recently on My Micro Fund. Very interesting reading. Reading the 10 questions they answered, I was feeling like I am only one step close to the success. It’s like if I can get sleep as much as they do I can be as close as they are.

Funny thinking like that way. But it’s true that while I was burning myself out by only having around 5 hours sleep a day I was quite surprised found out that busy people like John and Shoemaker can still gain about 8 hours sleep a day. I guess that’s maybe how they can be very productive and efficient during the day because they get recharged almost fully every night like my iPhone.

Anyway, here is the summery that says all.

You can conclude from this interview that if you want to be a serious money making blogger like Jeremy Schoemaker and John Chow, you will need to floss daily, enjoy food, get married, love your wife, be asleep between midnight to 6am and most importantly, without a question, to choose the internet over sex.

10 Revealing Q&As By John Chow & Shoemoney [My Micro Fund]

Simple Marketing Ideas for Freelancers

FreelanceSwitch shared a very good collection of 50 simple marketing ideas, some of which are quite informative and innovative. Definitely worth checking, considering and even trying. And most of them are very inexpensive, though not all of them are free. Here are the top 10 ideas among them, note that starting a blog is on the first spot.

1. Start a blog
2. Go to Chamber of Commerce events and other local business events 
3. Release products (icons, articles, etc.) that can be used for free with attribution
4. Hand out business cards 
5. Guest post on blogs relevant to your skills 
6. Attend meetups in your area 
7. Place your brochures with printers, or other relevant businesses 
8. Organize a BarCamp or other unconference 
9. Network online with sites like LinkedIn or Twitter 
10. Share samples of your work online

50 Simple Marketing Ideas All Freelancers Can Use [FreelanceSwitch]