Daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial offer huge discounts on products and services through partnerships with local merchants. These deal of the day websites can produce wonders for local small businesses that need foot traffic. Traditional online advertising isn’t nearly as effective as social buying platforms for getting people to visit local storefronts. For approximately the same price as a decent-sized online advertising campaign, a collective buying site will feature your business’s deal offering on their website and notify local email subscribers. With many of these online services boasting readership in the millions, they can literally flood your store with hundreds to thousands of new customers within a single day or two.

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WordPress slideshow plugins can be very powerful tools for both publishers and designers. If used correctly, a slideshow plugin for WordPress can effectively highlight featured posts and images within your WP blog to capture the reader’s attention. The WP plugin repository is overflowing with slide show plugins but many of them either aren’t well supported or they are poorly developed. We’ve sifted through an incredible amount of those to select our favorites. Below you’ll find a list of free and premium WordPress slide show plugins that are both well supported and frequently updated. We plan to keep adding to this list as new ones are launched. After reviewing those below you should stop by to see our premium WordPress plugins directory which contains other kickass WP plugins that can help you juice-up your blog.

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Groupon, the pioneer of daily deal sites, offered its first nationwide deal yesterday and according to the Chicago Tribune, they sold 445,000 deals for its client, Gap. The $25 voucher worth up to $50 in Gap apparel became available at about 6:30 AM PST and ended at around midnight. The Gap deal offering was so popular it even crashed Groupon’s servers for a short while. Groupon normally takes 50% of all deal sales which means that they earned an estimated $5,562,500. Clearly it was a very successful day for Groupon. Unfortunately the jury is still out as to whether or not Gap came away from this deal as a winner. By our calculations they stand to lose at least $8 million unless they can convince their new customers to keep coming back.

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Daily deal sites like Groupon can be a small business owner’s greatest tools for generating sales. However, daily deal websites can also cause more harm than good if the business owner doesn’t do his/her homework upfront. Most daily deal business models take about 50% of all coupon sales leaving the business owner with only 25% of the original price amount for the product or service. That’s because most deals sold there offer 50% off the original price. As you can see, it can be quite costly for any entrepreneur to utilize a deal distribution service.

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A WordPress directory plugin or a WordPress directory theme can help you either integrate a simple link directory for WordPress or create a stand alone business directory website, respectively. Whether you’d like to establish a professional directory service using a premium WordPress directory theme, or you just want to add a directory plugin for WordPress to merely feature your favorite links, there are several WP plugins and themes that can help. The free directory plugins for WordPress offer many features but many are plagued with infrequently updates and a lack of support. In contrast, both commercial WP directory themes and premium WordPress directory plugins are usually well supported and they offer frequent updates. Below we’ve compiled a review list of some of the best WordPress directory plugins and the top WordPress directory themes that are now available for free or paid use. If you’re in need of other great tools for your WP website, see our comprehensive list of premium WordPress plugins.

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Groupon’s command of the daily deal sites market is impressive to say the least. Since launching in November of 2008, it has expanded to serve 22 countries and hundreds of cities with a total of 11 million subscribers worldwide. Despite its commanding lead on other group buying competitors, the percentage of traffic from organic search is very little. According to Compete, nearly all of Groupon’s traffic comes from email and social marketing (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) referrals. Clearly Groupon’s brand is a very powerful and trusted source for attracting local merchants and deal crazed consumers. If Groupon’s brand or its product (i.e. deal vouchers) was diluted in any way, the effects could therefore be devastating.

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New group buying sites are launching nearly everyday to quench the ferocious appetite of local group coupon crazed consumers that can’t resist the huge discounts offered by daily deal websites. Social buying is particularly attractive to online businesses and publishers because it helps them tap into local markets and expand their customer base. Despite the incredible growth rates of large collective buying sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, the majority of cities throughout the U.S. remain unclaimed. As more competitors enter the group buying coupon market, the need for daily deal marketplaces where consumers can buy and sell discount vouchers increases as well. Below we have compiled a review list of group coupon marketplaces that have already sprouted up to address the growing demand for buying and selling Groupons.

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Free and premium WordPress newsletter plugins are a WP site owner’s most powerful tool for growing a mailing list or email subscription. Subscribers of newsletters want to keep up to date with what your business or site is doing and email newsletters are still the best way to communicate that information with your readers and customers. From a business perspective email subscription lists are preferred over Facebook and Twitter followers because click-through rates (CTR) are much greater and this medium offers more flexibility in some aspects. Recently there’s been a surge of new premium WP newsletter plugins that have been developed to improve subscriber rates in a more effective and elegant manner. Below we’ve created a review list of the best WordPress newsletter plugins currently available. If you’d like to learn about other professional tools for your WP site, take a peek at our premium WordPress plugin directory.

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We previously speculated about how Twitter deals might be promoted through the @Earlybird account using a group buying model. However, as it turned out, Twitter is merely partnering with group buying sites like Groupon and Gilt to deliver time-sensitive discounts on products with limited quantities. Unfortunately, Twitter’s initial promotions weren’t exactly killer group buying deals. The first one was a buy one, get one free movie ticket for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the other deal offering was for a 32-inch Vizio HDTV at Target. Depending on how much you may have disliked the movie, the TV is the worst deal out of the two since it could have been purchased at Sam’s Club for $1.99 less ($349.99 at Target, $348.00 at Sam’s).

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