How To Save Time & Money Wtih Craigslist and Angie’s List
Looking for some help with your household to-dos? Hiring some help to hang your pictures, fix your PC, or hang your new sparkly chandelier can be a good thing if you’re not so handy yourself or you know that your time would be better spent doing something else. But with so many online service sites, like Craigslist, and Angie’s List, how do you know where to go to find the best value.
A very special thank you to the Digeratilife. We stumbled upon this very insightful article while searching for some help to install some new appliances this weekend. We loved their advice so much, we wanted to share it with all of you today– enjoy and happy outsourcing!
Angie’s List vs Craigslist: Help Wanted for Products & Services
You may have heard of Craigslist before, but what’s Angie’s List? Angie’s List is a membership referral or recommendation site that allows users to post reviews of the companies and services they use. You can look for reviews under sections for Home, Outdoor, Health, Personal Services, and Others — over 250 overall. For example, if you’re seeking a local tree service to work on your yard, you can see how many are listed for your area, how to contact them, what types of payment they accept, and if there are any special coupons for Angie’s List members.
Most importantly, you can also read reviews written by members — the negative as well as the positive. When members review a company or service, they’re handing out grades on categories like price, responsiveness, quality, and more. Other members can also see how much you’ve paid for a service, if you’d hire again, comments, and other information.
If you’re looking for a free alternative to Angie’s List, Yelp might be a good resource. It features more of a social-networking aspect, with votes for reviews, a newest favorites section, and a ‘Best Of’ section that spotlights favorite restaurants, shopping, nightlife, as well as beauty and spas.
Craigslist: For Online Classifieds
Who hasn’t heard of Craigslist yet? It’s probably the site with the biggest name recall in its niche, and we’ve even shared how this site has been used successfully, through these articles:Online Shopping With Craigslist: How We Got A Bargain On Some Used Furniture
How To Sell on Craigslist: Listed Our Honda For Sale and Scored
Craigslist is an online community with classified ad listings across a multitude of categories: Jobs, Gigs, Services, For Sale, Community, Housing, Personals, and the Discussion Forum. Most ads don’t cost anything to post. with certain exceptions like the job ads in San Francisco and brokered apartment rental ads in New York City.For instance, if you want to find the parts for a media center computer, you could scroll though the For Sale listings in the Computer or Electronics categories. And if the prospect of putting the project together seems too much for you, the services section might yield a contractor or shop that’s willing to do the job for a reasonable price. Also, using the search box to find specific items is a lot easier than hunting down a copy of the newspaper. Say you’re looking for a Yamaha motorcycle. You can look at the bottom of the page and subscribe to the RSS feed for your search. This way, you’ll automatically receive fresh leads each day. Just like Yelp, you’ll want to be careful about how you’re using Craigslist. It’s an environment that’s not strictly regulated, so you’ll have to extra vigilant about the transactions you perform through this site.
