Everyone loves coupons. Whenever I shop online and I find a coupon field during checkout I’ll always stop the checkout process and find a free coupon to use. On my ecommerce site I too have a coupon field. It amazes me when orders come through without the customer using a coupon. I don’t mind it… more profit for me, but it still amazes me.
For my ecommerce site I have coupons spread all over the internet. Because I use special codes for the coupons I can always tell exactly where the coupon deal was acquired from. For example, I have a special coupon for people who use Smarter.com. I have a special coupon deal for each blog that reviews my products. My affiliates will have coupons that all of the affiliates can use, and then my top performing affiliates will have special coupons that are only for them.
Most of my affiliates are coupon sites. These coupon sites list all the coupons offered by online merchants. If you use coupons you know the standard look of these sites. The majority of them look alike. Logo on the top left corner, Left sidebar showing categories, typically a dropdown menu of merchants in alphabetical order and on the home page will be the largest online retialers and thier coupons. If you go to a specific merchant page it will list the current coupons available, expired coupons and usually a rating or voting system that allows people to vote if a particular coupon was successfully used or not. Near the bottom, usually underneath the coupon information for the merchant will be a paragraph that is stuffed with coupon keywords and the merchant name.
Now as much as I love coupon websites I really don’t think we need anymore of them. The best coupon sites are really good at what they do. The have exclusive deals with merchants, they keep their database consistently updated, they have interactive sites and well done newsletters. For a newbie trying to start a affiliate coupon site it would be extremely hard to compete with the big names.
I think most people that are new to affiliate marketing think that a coupon site is the easy way to make money. Most of the time they’ll be wrong. Any experienced affiliate marketing person can set up a coupon site in a matter of hours or one full day. A simple CMS, pull in feeds from the merchants and wallaa you have a website. The hard part is the SEO and marketing of it and that’s where the new marketers fail.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing do yourself a favor… don’t start another free coupon website. The market is flooded and you’ll be wasting your time. Try something unique. Pick a niche and concentrate on that one niche. Try writing some original content, put affiliate links in the content, post or recommend indivudual products or a group of products. It’s a little more work, but it pays off.
What do you think? Are there enough coupon sites or do you think the internet needs more? What’s your favorite free coupon site?
Hi, I'm Steve... an eCommerce merchant that writes about eCommerce, advertising, marketing, blogging, design, social media, seo, tech and other randomness.