It’s about a site i came across that looks like a novel approach to Discount Code/Coupon sites. These are a hot area, and one I’ve written about before - and they are particularly relevant in the current economic climate, but many people find that it’s difficult to get a decent Coupon site going. It can be difficult to locate good Coupons and keep the current ones on your site – and it can be a pain managing a lot of affiliate accounts.

Doug and the guys at ASAP have come up with Promotions.co.uk - a service that will let you run a Coupon site or have Coupon sections on your Content site with two big advantages: they do most of the leg work for you and, more importantly, you can get to keep most, if not all, all of the revenue

The service is still in development at the moment, and the final product will be refined as a result of feedback, but to me it looks like a fantastic idea. I haven’t got the time to be maintaining a hundred affiliate accounts or constantly looking for good and current offers that match my content – so this could just offer a solution for me, and for many of you.

Various benefits include (paraphrased from the Promotions.co.uk site):

• Your own discount code website or subdomain or our discount codes on your site, similar to adsense. Site can be built, or you can use a CMS to manage a coupon site, or you can add some code to your site for displaying coupons
• They collect and control all the codes on your behalf.
• You can add your own exclusive codes if you have any.
• They ensure that as many merchant’s discount codes as possible are live in the system, without you having to request them from a network or a merchant.
• All you have to do is drive traffic to your site(s). You can do this any way you wish and if you want to add unique content to your discount site then you can.
• If you have a content site you can add their code to each page and the discount codes for merchant with that product will display show. Hence protecting content/information sites from losing sales to voucher code sites.

Doug is a top bloke (check out the interview with him if you haven’t already), his ideas are usually spot-on and ASAP have great contacts with big players in the industry, so my guess is that this will be a winner.

You’ve got nothing to lose so hop on over to Promotions.co.uk and check it out for yourself.

So it’s understandable that you’d want a piece of the action. Trouble is, there are a million people out there setting up new coupon sites at the same time, so you’re working in a very competetive marketplace. But there’s a way to get ahead of the pack, and that’s by NOT setting up a Coupon site.

Instead, use your existing Web presence to kick-start your Coupons.

How?

Assume that you already have a site (or sites) out there (Blogs or Content sites or whatever) which means you’re already indexed with your existing content. Your site has some history, it has some visitors, it has backlinks and it maybe has some PR or other ranking.    

So why not make the most of that advantage by adding Coupon codes and Vouchers to your existing sites?

You can do this by adding new pages or sections to the site, or by adding a content block or sidebar to certain pages, listing latest or rotating offers.

Why?

• You’ll have a population of existing site visitors who’ll see these offers immediately, and of course you’ll be able to utilise any existing subscriber/mailing lists you might have.
• Your Coupons will be being presented to an audience who are more likely to ‘trust’ you as opposed to the million other straight-up coupon sites out there.
• You’ll be able to contextually target your coupons to the specific site or even page audience, so your coupons and vouchers will be being shown to a demographic that’s going to be more likely to show interest in them. 
• People are searching more and more for specific types of discount codes (products, brands etc) and you’ll likely attract a proportion of these people to your site as well.

Sure, there will be some effort to target and monitor your coupons/vouchers and so on, but you’re going to have a head start on all the ‘generic’ coupon code sites out there.

It doesn’t have to degrade from your site appearance or aesthetics, and it’s easy to trial it on selected pages or for a period of time – so give it a go. Leverage the advantage your existing site will give you.    

Based on an original idea from “Gorgeous” Doug Scott