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Lately, I’ve gotten more and more questions about how to find blogs for this store, or that city. And with so many frugal living and coupon blogs available to choose from, I thought I’d share my thoughts today about how to find and select blogs to follow.

Finding Local Coupon Blogs

Probably the easiest way to begin to separate coupon blogs is by determining the local ones from the national ones.

No matter where you’re from, I highly recommend you find a handful of quality, local blogs to follow. These blogs will help you find what’s on sale at the stores in your neighborhood. They may also share events or sales at places unique to your neck of the woods. Three places to find blogs in your area:

1. The Grocery Gathering. Sort by State or store to find what you’re looking for.
2. The Frugal Map. Conceptualized by Bargain Briana, this handy tool will help you find bloggers from your State.
3. Money Saving Mom’s Grocery Page. Money Saving Mom features the grocery matchups of many, many bloggers. Click on the logo to find the store you’re looking for. These posts are highlights only. Click through to the blogger’s list she’s featured for more.

For blogs in the Pacific Northwest area, make sure to additionally stop by my Cool Blogs page.

Finding National Coupon Blogs

National coupon blogs generally receive a sizeable amount of traffic and have de-emphasized local deals. In this way, the majority of readers will be able to take advantage of the deals they share. They may focus on nationally-based chains such as Target and Walgreens. Some, like Money Saving Mom, may additionally have backpages that link to regional deals.

For maximum “deal catching,” I recommend you follow a couple nationally-based coupon blogs in addition to the local blogs you follow. These blogs often get many bloggers sending them hot deals, which means they can be a great “hub” of information.

Some nationally-based blogs I follow include Money Saving Mom, Hip2Save, The Savings Lifestyle, Deal Seeking Mom, and Common Sense with Money.

Finding Coupon Blogs for your Lifestyle

Not all coupon blogs are alike!

Some take a specific angle. Some may be faith-based, some may focus on organic and healthy deals, others still may help you find savings for your pet or baby!

One way to find such blogs is to Google. For instance, you could Google “organic coupon blogger” and find The Thrifty Mama. Another thought is to watch the deals on the nationally-based blogs. When a particular deal catches your eye, follow the “thank you” link through to the blogger that sent it over.

Making the Cut

With so many coupon blogs to follow out there, how can you decide which to follow?

Here are some initial ideas I have for you:

• Read through the blogger’s last 10-20 posts. This will give you a sensibility of what they like to post about and how they like to share it. Online deals? Local deals? Coupon matchups? Recipes and frugal living? Frequency of posts?
• Read the blogger’s “About” page. This should hopefully not only give you a sense of who this blogger is, but what you can expect on their blog and their style.
• Check out the comments left on the blog. Does the blog have a friendly community of folks willing to help one another out? While this isn’t absolutely a “must,” it might be a nice perk! Often, additional ways to work a deal and hot tips can come in the comment section of a coupon blog.
• Check out the blogger’s Facebook page. Does the blogger do a good job of notifying folks of “hot” deals? Answer questions from followers as they arise? Or are all their updates automated? Again, this might not be a “must,” but if it’s one way you choose to follow blogs, it could be a consideration.

Following the Blogs

Once you have your list of blogs to follow, you have a few ways you could follow them. I personally do two:

1. Google Reader. Using this free tool, I simply subscribe to the blogs I wish to follow. This aggregates the posts for me so I don’t have to visit each and every blog throughout the day. You can additionally “group” the blogs you follow, but I’ve yet to do this. For instance, you could group the local blogs.
2. Facebook. I LOVE following blogs on Facebook! If you don’t do this already, I recommend it. You can generally get FAST answers to your question, interact directly with the blogger and other readers. Bloggers will often share nuggets you just won’t find on their blogs including sale alerts. I’ve been known to give away coupons to my Facebook followers on occasion as well!

I hope this post was helpful! It’s not the be-all-end-all definitive way of how you must select and follow blogs, so you may have additional thoughts on this topic. And I’d love to hear ‘em.

How do you decide which coupon blogs to follow? How many do you personally follow? And how do you like to follow them – Google, Facebook, Twitter, visiting each of them, or something else?

Photo credit Alfonso Romero