Contents:
Allowing them to rate deals, leave comments, post their own deals, get involved with the community through forum and so on. And an idea that has clearly resonated with hundreds of millions of people who have landed on their website.
Their app for iPhone has now had millions of downloads as well, further solidifying their focus on branding". Firstly you'll have to pick your niche. There's no point in trying to compete with the billion dollar companies who have the main markets dominated. Think of something smaller that's in high demand and pricey enough that people look to get a promo code for.
It could be web hosting, hobby related, sports and activities, web hosting or themes, food related, hotels etc. Then make sure you can find affiliate programs that allow you to generate discount codes. Facebook Ads targeted at niche fan pages could work well here. Sharing codes on classified ad sites like Gumtree and Yelp as well as offline classified ads. Creating a blog and engaging in a content marketing strategy of posting high quality posts relevant to your niche, interviewing and featuring major players , linking out and sharing other bloggers content.
Like RetailMeNot you'll want to build a community and get people interacting with the site — rating deals, leaving feedback and comments and even getting your own forum up and running. Don't forget to build an email list as this will help bring in repeat traffic. Send out daily deals, blog content, email exclusives, news about the niche to keep people opening your mails.
You'll have to have your affiliate agreements in place and coupon codes from the beginning — it would help if you already have agreements with a lot of the companies you plan to work with. Take advantage of our Affiliate Hacks report. Even if the discount code doesn't net you a commission but is the best saving for your visitor display it - this creates huge value! There's huge potential for you to get involved in one of the less competitive markets and carve out your own piece of this billion dollar pie.
Pick a niche that's not too obvious but where people regularly spend money online and the purchase price is enough to warrant seeking out promo codes. Use copywriting if you're writing product reviews as James shows here. Be creative with your traffic generation as SEO traffic may not come instantly for your online coupon business.
Coupon websites give marketers access to audiences of shoppers who are interested in deals. One of the most important functions that coupon websites play is to test and verify coupons, especially promo codes, so that visitors can reliably find working coupons when they need them. This is an important but resource-intensive task — some coupon sites do a great job with this but many do not more on this below. Additionally, some coupon sites offer cash-back loyalty programs in which they incentivize shoppers by paying them a percentage of each sale made through their website.
Traditional coupon sites are the ones that will probably look most familiar to you.
Added shortcode preview to admin types overview page Fix: Added new setting in order to customize button colors New: Simple answers, easy-to-follow advice, and real reviews are just some of the helpful articles shared on Work From Home Happiness to help you kick your cubicle to the curb. How Retailmenot will know if the user they referred made a purchase or not??? Con's Of Coupon Affiliate Sites Lots of competition in the big markets so they are saturated but if you niche down it's not a problem as there seems to be few niche coupon sites around. Now we can take the next step: When you start a coupon site, you can help people do just that.
They typically manage a large email list and can drive customers to your brand via their newsletters. For traditional coupon sites, search engines are also an important source of traffic, as consumers search on sites like Google for coupon codes and land on these websites. These sites tend to focus on verifying thousands of coupons each day so that they can provide an accurate and reliable coupon search experience.
Some of these sites are more generalized, and others focus on more niche interest areas. These websites tend to have very engaged audiences and often have great insight into the types of offers that will perform with their users. The key to working with these sites is to find the ones with audiences that will be drawn to your brand and offer. Coupon forums are places where anyone can go to share and discuss deals. Slickdeals is the largest coupon forum, with many millions of people going there every day to get the scoop on the best deals of the day.
For advertisers, coupon forums can be great places to advertise your deals typically on their homepage simply given the large number of users who visit those sites. In many cases, marketers solicit popular forum members and create direct relationships in which those members will promote their deals. Cash-back sites such as Ebates have been around for a long time and are super popular with shoppers since they not only offer coupons, they pay their customers a slice of the commissions you pay them.
These are also known as loyalty sites , since most of the shoppers on these sites tend to do most of their shopping through their cash-back systems.
One reason to work with cash-back sites is that due to high loyalty among their users you may only get access to these customers by going through the cash-back site. On the flipside, most loyalty customers maintain their loyalty to these cashback sites, and are less likely to become loyal customers of your brand. If your competitor offers a coupon through the same cash-back site, your customers are likely to switch over to them. Many coupon sites including RetailMeNot have recently started to offer cash-back loyalty programs as a way to increase loyalty from their customer bases.
Most of these extension sites also offer cash-back programs. RetailMeNot recently launched its own browser extension to compete with Honey.
So paying a commission to the extension company at this point may make less sense from a marketing standpoint. At a loss for a niche? When I need a little niche inspiration, I think of the three broad money-making niches out there:. Grab a pen and paper or open up a new Google Doc and start jotting down potential ideas. Think of your interests, experience, and hobbies. Do any of them fall within the big 3 money-making categories? Do a Google search to see if there are any existing coupon sites focusing on that particular niche.
Try to come up with ten ideas. I bet at least one of them will turn out to be your niche! Now we can take the next step: Setting up your coupon site. But when you put them together, you get a super easy way to own and maintain a professional and profitable website. BlueHost is a hosting provider.
And as a Work from Home Happiness reader, you get extra special offers: Go check it out.
You can seriously get your site up in a very short time, even if you have zero previous experience. You can also customize your site using themes and plugins, which means you never have to touch a line of code! And there are a number of themes that are made specifically for those who want to start a coupon site more on that later. With the right theme uploaded, you can have a very pretty and functional coupon site right out of the box. A quick search for coupon theme on marketplaces, like Envato, will yield a ton of results.
This theme has great reviews and offers a lot of bang for your buck.
My favorite features include:. Go ahead and demo it before you buy. The majority of your money will be made with affiliate links.
From Things Remembered to Under Amour, these are all affiliate links! Whenever someone visits the Retail Me Not site, clicks on one of these links, and then makes a purchase, Retail Me Not gets a percentage of the sale.
After we cilck on the link from Retail Me Not, the address highlighted in red above contains specific tracking info, called a cookie. Now when we make a purchase, Retail Me Not will get a percentage or commission. So, how exactly do you find affiliate programs to join? There are 50 affiliate networks listed as well as helpful hints for finding niche affiliate programs. Ready to start a coupon site?