If you want to have a go at affiliate marketing then a voucher code website is an excellent idea. But, how do you do this cheaply? Well a blog can be cheap, even free, and yet it will work brilliantly. Here are a few pointers to get you going!
To start off your own voucher code website you can simply build your website using any available blogging software. Many bloggers use Blogger for this purpose, or you can purchase some hosting and install WordPress or any other blogging tool onto the hosting.
My Preference Is For WordPress
For my purposes, I always use WordPress. Yes, you need to pay for the hosting space, but there are tons of free themes available to use and a wealth of excellent plugins that can extend the reach of the blog. So I usually talk in WordPress terms, although the instructions are fairly similar for any blogging tool you want to try out.
Customise Your Look
So install, or create, your blog. Then look for some free themes and try out a couple. It is always useful to experiment with a few themes as quite often what looks good at first glance doesn’t look so good when you install it. It doesn’t matter too much if the style is not perfect, you can change it easily enough in the future.
Add Some Plugins
With a voucher code website you want to be displaying the latest available vouchers, which is great as most themes do that automatically. But, if you also install plugins such as related posts, then these plugins can detect similar content. This could provide readers with similar voucher codes that they might be interested in.
Categorise Your Blog
A blog can be a very well categorised website, when used properly, and this is an important feature in a voucher code website. Start to create categories for all of the merchants that you will be dealing with. If your search engine optimisation is worked on for these category pages, then people finding your website will see the list of all current posts relating to that merchant.
Use Tags Cleverly
One problem with a discount code website is that you should remove expired codes, or at least mark the expired codes as such. But keeping a track of this can be a nightmare, if not done properly. So leave yourself a clue.
All that you need to do is to use the tags to mark against each post an indicator as to when the offer expires. This could be an exact date or grouped together within a week. But by tidying up the expired codes, your visitors will find your site more useful.
Click To Reveal, Or Plain Text?
This can be a big debate. Some affiliates worry about losing sales if the codes are freely displayed and they do not force the important cookie onto the visitor’s machine, but click to reveal is also hated by many. I say be open, make life easy for yourself and just show the codes in plain text.
