Marketing Your Website

Jul 24, 2007 -

After a couple of months of development, Discount Codes has finally shifted on to my server and has gone live and now is the time to think about some sort of link building and marketing. Obviously the more inbound links from related websites is the answer but I have often wondered whats the best method for linking;

Is one better than the other? Is it best to stick to one linking format only and does the attribute title=”Discount Codes” help with text links in any way, shape or form?

There are still a few tweaks here and there to be completed, but as the majority of the site is functioning as it should, I thought it no point to delay it any more. The next stage of development is already underway in planning terms with a few nice little additions which will hopefully come to fruition in the coming months.

Marketing it… this is something I have thought about quite a lot as I PPC the site, however I am a lazy PPC’er. By this I mean for example, I am willing to spend £100 per day as long as it generates £110. This website is no different to other PPC campaigns I run and it does annoy me at how lazy I can be at times. After all if I spent a bit of time analysing what words or phrases are performing, I’m sure I could easily reduce my outgoings without affecting my incomings.

I read Kierons blog regarding his Pen Give Away marketing campaign for his Bingo website. Obviously the type of visitor to my website is after discount codes or voucher codes and as such is what I would class as a scrounger. Nothing wrong with that, after all it’s what got me into Affiliate Marketing many moons ago and whenever I shop online, I still search for a discount code before checking-out. With this in mind, I was thinking that a freebie of sorts would be of interest to a few of my visitors, and may, like Kierons site, get backlinks from freebie sites.

Despite me not collecting peoples details in the past, I am sorely tempted. I have always taken a moral stance on obtaining details from people, as I personally hate it. I think I now need to differentiate between personal feelings and business opportunities.

Another option I will be looking into is having people write reviews on my website, again like Kieron has done and blogged about. Sadly, unlike Kieron I don’t have a stack of mobile phones to give away, so will have to source it myself at a cost to myself. I am not too sure how successful this idea was so will tap Kieron for an update.

http://www.onelittleduck.co.uk Jason

Freebies can be good, but be prepared to monitor things (and have a limit that cuts off the request form, once it’s been reached). A decent offer can be spread amongst forums very quickly, meaning you’re inundated with requests, and if you don’t deliver, it’s very quickly for any “goodwill” to be be rapidly undone.

Collecting details for your own mailing list is something you should do Chris – that’s a sensible move, but I’m not keen on collecting data to sell to third parties so that’s something we don’t do.

I think that just because you have a business doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice all your morals for a few extra quid here and there.

Jason
http://www.leemccoy.co.uk Lee McCoy

Hi Mate

I’d definitely go for “http://www.discountcodes.co.uk” and stick to it. I’d avoid the /index.* option.

Also, I’d make sure you register the site with http://www.google.com/webmasters and make sure you tell them that you wanted them to treat http://www.discount* as your site and not http://discount* – you’ve probably doen this already anyway!

Another way for you to create your own “discount codes” group on facebook. If you keep it fresh people will join. You’ll have their details so you won’t have to store them and you get people attracting others to your group.

Another option is to leverage Squidoo. Or add your offers to StumbleUpon – there’s loads of Social stuff that you can do to compensate for not having a huge budget or not enough time to build a huge forum or network.

Hope it helps,

Lee