What are some of the challenges facing coupon affiliates today? Well, for starters:

• Finding and maintaining the most current offers for each of your programs.
• Driving potential customers to these offers/exposure.
• Making sure that you have a compelling offer.
• Determining who your target market/audience is, and then effectively marketing to them.

There of course are other challenges that coupon affiliates face, but I would like to focus in and talk about different strategies, ideas, and thoughts that I have found to work with several coupon affiliates. This is not going to be a “how to get rich by starting a coupon site” article or me sharing proprietary information from specific coupon sites. What I do hope to do is shed some light on helpful tips/tricks/tools that can make your life easier…and maybe even help you generate more sales.

So how do you find and maintain the most current offers for each of your programs? Well, you can start by spending hours upon hours trying to dig for coupons and links in the affiliate interface of every network you are part of (not fun, FYI). If you’re a little “tech-savvy” (and the network provides this), you can pull an RSS or data-feed that will send you all of the current promotions and offers. Finally, if you are fortunate enough to have an affiliate manager you work with, they can help you compile and consolidate all of the offers and deliver them to your inbox.

What’s the best option? I am a big believer in personal relationships in the industry, so I prefer working with the human element. There is an article written by Ian Larsen that is posted on Digital Moses on how to effectively distribute coupons to affiliates. His format was a significant influence in the coupon management tool I built and use daily with the affiliates I work with. The key is consolidating the offer description, start/expiration date, coupon code (if needed), and affiliate links in an easy-to-use format that affiliates can upload into their website. Affiliate feedback on this tool has been amazing, and affiliates have now been able to easily manage all of the current offers available and work with an actual person (me) instead of a data feed.

Do 30 day offers work better than offers that are good for 60-90 days? A derivative topic of “Finding and Maintaining current offers” is determining what length of offer works best. There are many factors involved, however a key component is based on how you’re driving traffic to the offer. If you are driving traffic using paid search, you can promote ads on the search engines that will quickly increase your traffic and sales. This is great for short term offers. If you rely heavily on natural or “organic” search results, you rely on being indexed by the search engines which takes time. You will find having offers that include relevant content around the offer and that run for 60-90+ days work best.

Can you do both? You can supplement your natural search results by creating paid search ads that drive traffic to the offer via an interstitial page on your website that provides key features, product description, and other relevant information. If you build solid content that gets indexed by the search engines AND supplementing your natural search by also driving traffic via PPC ads, you get the best of both worlds and are not relying heavily on one or the other. Just like investing, it is wise to “diversify” how you drive traffic to your offer. The bottom line is that if a consumer is out looking for coupon offers, they are 90% sold on the product and now looking for the best deal. If you can provide a compelling offer and provide great content you will bridge that 10% gap and increase your close-ratio/conversion rate ultimately generating more sales.

Post your thoughts!

Rick Gardiner
Manager, Affiliate Development LEC
oneNetworkDirect

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Reference: “The Critical Coupon Code Step” by Ian Larsen: http://www.dmconfidential.com/blogs/column/Affiliate_Marketing_Tips/534/

2 Responses to “Coupon Affiliates…Affiliate Coupons”

1. Melino Says:
   November 5th, 2007 at 3:55 am

   I like online coupons and offers as it saves our money and time, recently I visited Target store at Couponalbum.com where I received free shipping…!!!

2. Eric Says:
   November 5th, 2007 at 11:18 am

   This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Affiliate Coupons. Thanks for informative article

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