Making Money: Start Coupon Website

2009-05-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

A bit of History:

Everyday you hear the terms like Coupons, Deals, Discounts, Promotion, Savings, Sales, BOGO and on and on... When I first saw "Apply Coupon Code" on one of the online site, I seriously thought that as some sort of scam to make the online shoppers search for some non-existing coupon code on the web-but that was before the internet bubble time.

Though I was a Mr.Skeptic, I was also a relative of curious Mr.George and that caused me to surf farther in the web ocean, which eventually helped me to save 5% of my hard earned after tax remains of my wallet. I would say, that was an eye opener for me and since then, I don't recollect buying anything online with out either a deep discount online deal or without using a Couponcode. Initially I was happy with this savings and I kept searching for coupons and deals on various sites like Techbargains.com, Deals2buy.com, XPbargains.com, Coupons.com, couponcabin.com etc.. and list goes on and on...

I kind of got addicted to surfing for deals and started emailing my friends with the specials of the day and awesome deals etc... Then something else started happening.. My friends started asking me questions like " Hey..Is there any deals for an HP Laptop?", " Which site gives the best deals on a Canon?" etc..So as soon as I reach home, I am back on computer just to search for a deal to make my friends happy. And before I realizedd, I became Mr.Coupon for my friends and colleagues. At some point during this process I started thinking of the entire Coupon distribution process and a question came to my head, why don't I start my own site to distribute coupons and make some money out of this rather than just spend my time searching for coupons to make my friends happy.

So I decided to start my own website and registered a domain...

Couponchooser.com

I don't want you to crack your head searching for coupons. I recommend everyone to just read the following and start their own coupon sites. Though its not an easy task, from my experience, I can tell you one thing about a coupon site: " Its not a rocket science". So be confident and if possible do it at a relaxed pace.

Step 1: Checking the availability of the business name and Domain Registration

I have visited GODADDY, which is one of the cheapest and most "RELIABLE" domain registration company.

Searched for the couponsite name of your choice and I got Couponchooser.com as available and I registered the same for just a few bucks.[Just remember-if you are doing it while you are reading this article, by clicking the Godaddy banner above, you become automatically eligibile for rates similar to applying the coupon code.]

Please note that there are 100s of other domain registration sites. Just be careful about their reliability.

Step 2: Webhosting

The next step is to find a place to host your site. If you are a person who does not want to make your life complicated, then my advice is to host the site with the same company who helped you register the website.

If you are interested in hosting with Godaddy, they have a deal where by they give a highly discounted rate for the step 1{registration of domain}. But in case if you had registered with another company and would like to host on Godaddy, I have given the link below which will give you a discounted hosting package.

Step 3: Finding Coupon Feeds

This is an area where beginners can get distracted and decide to drop their dream. When I was in the initial process of planning for couponchooser.com , I was planning to search the web for individual retail sites and grab the deals manualy copy the promotion information and paster or re-enter the information so that the visitors of my site will find all the deals on my site. But I always thought that, there has to be a better way for collecting the coupopns. I kept searching and stumbled upon the term "Affiliate Marketing". Thats when I got my first smile of relief.

Affiliate marketing is a term used to explain the "business of middleman" in modern internet era. Though it sounds like a small stuff, believe me, this is what has changed the entire online industry and made the coupon publishing a child's play and by extension, helped me to setup couponchooser.com.

There are a few major players in this segment: I would rate them as given below:[ This is my opinion]

1) Commission Junction.
2) Link Share.
3) Amazon Associates.
4) Shareasale.
5) Avant Link.

There are many like these..But I guess those given above comes in the top tier and covers 90% of North American affiliate market.

You may be curious to know what these affiliate sites do:

Basically they act as a broker between the Merchant, who is the advertiser and Affiliates, who will be the publisher. They collect a % of the sale value as commission and pass it on to us. From the first time I heard about this, I struck me deep and I knew that I have found my living without actually going through the complication of selling stuff and storing inventory and finding finances for piling up those inventory...So here's what I did. I simply became an affiliate of a few majors from the above list and listed couponchooser.com as the primary website for publishing the advertisements.

You have understand one thing: The affiliate companies like Commission Junction, ShareAsale etc... have a lot of partners, who are hungry to push their deals to the consumers. Also those affiliate companies have got members like couponchooser.com who is hungry to make money by publishing those deals.

To make our life easy, most of them provide us with a feed, which can be either an XML file or a CSV file or some file with an aggregation of all the deals from merchants to whom you have become an affiliate.

Step 4: Preparing your Website

Formating the content to suite your taste[Actually you should match the site to the liking of your visitors]. If you are doing it by yourself, then please understand that you are expected to know a bit of HTML, javascript etc...But from this point, its left to your imagination. You may find softwares like Frontpage, Pagebreeze etc as they can help you design the site faster and aesthetically appealing.

Step 5: Making your site liked by major search engines

A few things should be taken care of while building your pages so that those pages will be Search Engine Optimized [SEO]/ Search Engine Friendly...
a) Add Meta keyword and Meta keyword description to all your pages
b) Add Titles and subtitles to explain the content- so that the content will get noticed by Search engines.
c) Make sure that there are just 10 or less Meta Key words and also just two lines of keyword description.
d) Submit to public directories like DMOZ.com, DMEG.org, Yahoo.com, Local.com, CitySearch.com, loqal.com etc...
e) Make sure all images have ALT tag
f) Add a blog to your site
g) Manually Submit the domain URL to search engines like, Google.com, Yahoo.com, Live.com, Cuil.com etc..
h) Add a Bookmark button [You can visit Addthis.com to get one for free]
i) Add a link for Twitter [Visit twitter.com]
j) Add a listing on Xing.com
k) Try to get some link exchanges[Don't push it too hard]
There are a 100 small things like the ones above. Keep reading about the online promotion technics

I wish you all good luck and keep visiting the blog and leave a comment about this if you like the information.

Good luck again
Couponchooser

couponchooser

Coupons & Deals On Jewelry

2009-04-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

I have recently stubled upon a site dealing with coupons and promotions primarily focused in Jewelry & Watches, Baby products, Tech deals and Golf deals. The name of this site is couponchooser.com . The good thing is that, this one is not a messy site with a thousand links, where you may get lost. But instead this coupon site shows a very selective and crip list of promotions in the areas they are specialised in. The interesting part is that if some one wants to get lost in the thousands of coupons, you can have that as well, but this is achieved with remarkable restraint without distrurbing the core areas where this site is focusing.

Also, the other good thing about them is, they allow the visitors to print coupons directly from their site, without any registration process.

I felt like promoting this one as, I truly believe, it deserves the right space in the world of coupons and promotional deals.

2 thumbs up!!!

couponchooser