Introduction to Deal Alerts
Have you ever seen someone else get in on a killer deal and thought to yourself, “Why can’t I ever get in on one?” There are literally hundreds of resources on the net trying to bring you the best deals and it can be difficult to check them all. Today I want to focus on Slickdeals and how setting up a simple deal alert, can be the difference between getting in on the deal and missing out.
Slickdeals
In my opinion, Slickdeals is the king of online deal communities. Sure there are other sites out there, but this is my favorite and the one that I have used for almost a decade. More times then not I have found Slickdeals has hot deals posted the quickest and I have saved (and spent) countless thousands of dollars because of the website.
Once you register as a member of Slickdeals, you are then able to setup “Deal Alerts”. These alerts are customized searches that alert you when a deal comes up. The key to this is matching up your deal alerts with airlines, hotels or stores that you want to frequent because of category bonuses.
A great example of this is Staples. I have a deal alert setup for anything that receives 4 or more thumbs up votes (as voted by the community) with the word Staples in it. This means that I often see deals that are not of interest to me, but also means I am among the first to know when they have a killer promotion. I also have alerts setup for the other office supply stores since I earn 5x Ultimate Rewards points on these purchases with my Chase Ink card.
Setting Up A Deal Alert
1. Go to Slickdeals and sign up for an account.
2. Once signed up, click the “Deal Alerts” link at the top of the page.
3. You are now at your Deal Alerts page. This is the place where you can find all of the alerts that you have setup. To create a new alert, simply click the “Add A Deal Alert” button on the top right of the page.
4. On this next page you can setup the alert. The options are almost limitless and you may want to fool around to find what works best for you. You can define which forums to search, what ratings you want to see, the stores, tags and how you want to be notified.
5. Once you have setup the alert the way that you want, click “Add Alert” and you will now be notified of any deals that match the criteria you have set. The image below shows a deal alert for Staples that uses the term gift cards. It will notify me instantly via email when a thread gets at least 4 thumbs up. It took me 30 seconds to setup, but it will pay dividends I hope.
Things To Look For
Slickdeals like many of the other deal sites is more commercialized than it has ever been. This means that sometimes deals make it to the front page that perhaps shouldn’t since the company may be getting a kickback. This is why I always read the forum posts to see the details of a deal and what other members have said.
Other Sites
Like I mentioned above, there are hundreds of deal sites and almost all of them have some sort of system like this. My experience is that Slickdeals is the best, so I use them exclusively for general purpose deals. FatWallet is another huge deals site (affiliate link) and there are sites like The Flight Deal which focus on travel specific deals. (I highly recommend The Flight Deal.)
Since I aim to keep both my life and yours simple, I just wanted to talk about Slickdeals today. Spend five minutes to setup a few alerts and they will pay off. No matter which sites you join or frequent, it is always a good idea to be a part of the community and give back when you find a good deal.
Conclusion
The purpose of this post was to show has easy it is to setup deal alerts with Slickdeals. If you focus these alerts on travel related topics and stores which offer category bonuses, then I promise you will be among the first to know when a big deal happens. In the past week I saved over $100 on a limited time deal at Staples just off of a deal alert like the one given in the example.
While this is only one part of my personal system of finding the best deals, it is a big one. What deal sites do you frequent? Let me know in the comments below.
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[…] other day I mentioned how to setup deal alerts in order to get in on the action before the masses come and kill a deal. To continue in this […]