If you are starting a voucher code website then getting visitors to it is vital. Without visitors, you will have no traffic and no commissions. What are you going to do?

Provide something unique
At first, this idea might seem pointless. But it is well worth you spending a little bit of time in hunting down internet based shops that are reasonably well known, that do not have affiliate schemes. Then sign up to their newsletters and add details of their latest offers to your website. Why? Keep reading -we come to that in a minute!

Search Engine Optimisation
There are two ways here – the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way is to try to optimise your website for the same merchants as every other one of the hundreds of affiliates that are promoting that merchant. So the right way is the first use of those non affiliate merchants. Because they are not running schemes there will not be a lot of competition and you can quickly build up a good ranking for these merchants. Yes, they might not earn you commissions, but they are the initial draw for your visitors.

Get social
Create a Facebook page and a Twitter account and get social marketing. Post onto each details of some of your latest discounts each day and start following other people and trying to get people to follow you. Make sure that you include a reasonable number every day and again those non affiliate merchants are vital. These are what will get you noticed and draw people over to your website. Too many people are promoting the same group of affiliate merchants, so you can stand out from the crowd and get noticed by being different. There is no reason not to also go social on those that you are earning a commission for, just make sure you are getting the important merchants noticed!

Create some adverts
It doesn’t take too long to look around and find some free vouchers of your own for Pay Per Click advertising and similar schemes (after all, you are running a voucher code website!). So, sign up to some of these and get hold of some free Pay Per Click advertising that can be used to draw in a few visitors. It doesn’t take many to make it worth your while!

Join forums
Take part in some money saving forums and post details of those discounts that are not related to affiliates. There is a big reason here for doing this – you aren’t promoting something that you have a financial interest in. When you sign up, leave a big clue in your username as to your website address and this should generate traffic!

Provide an interest
This is another part of those non affiliate merchants. By listing them clearly around the website when visitors arrive on your website and see these merchants they might recognise them as something different, something that they are interested in. Whilst this may not draw in new visitors, it will give those that are arriving more reason to bookmark your website or subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed. Building repeat visitors is far more efficient than building new visitors!

Finding merchants for your discount code website may sound an easy task at first, but get going and it is more involved than you might realise. Here is why.

Finding merchants that you will promote through your discount code website is actually very easy in a way. All that you need to do is to go to a few large affiliate program directories, sign up to as many merchants as interest you and that is really it.

These merchants will then start to send you regular emails of their latest discounts and offers. There will be emails that you can copy or retype onto your website and XML feeds that you can import in bulk if you are technically competent. So, where is the big problem?

This ease of access is a big problem
Well the problem is this. Every affiliate operating a discount code website in your country will be using the same basic set of merchants and promoting the same discount codes as they become available. Visitors looking around your website will see that it is full of the same offers that they have seen elsewhere and decide that they might as well just stick with what they know. Worse, if the site they are already with is doing the job properly, then you will have less offers and that certainly will not encourage them to come over to your service.

So you need to expand your offering outside of the immediate affiliate programs. And I know from experience that not only does this satisfy visitors, but because you are listing discounts and offers that are not on other websites there is a good chance that people will be finding you more easily on the search engines.

Find some non affiliate merchants
What you need to do is to start thinking of big name merchants (they do not have to be the leading names, just national names) and working out whether they offer affiliate schemes. You are looking those that don’t. Also, you can use keyword research tools to see what merchants people are searching for discount information on and check which of these do not run affiliate programs. It doesn’t matter so much if they have just an in house affiliate program, it is mainly the big network affiliate programs you are steering clear of.

Now quite simply look around the websites if all of these merchants and find their newsletters and sign up for them. Most will make this very easy to do and then all you have to do is to wait for the newsletter to arrive and upload those details.

The vital extra offering
And this second step is actually more critical than the mass joining of affiliate programs. By displaying discount codes that are more difficult to find and interesting to your visitors they are more likely to follow your site and sign up to your newsletter. It is also some great search engine bait.

So use some imagination when you are finding merchants for your discount code website!

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.

Are you looking at all of the voucher code websites that are on the internet and wondering how do they make money? Are you wondering if you could jump in too and earn some money? Well, it is very simple, when you know how.

In short, there are two types of voucher codes. There are those that you make money for directly and those that you don’t. This seems a stupid way to start off a discussion on how to make money through a voucher code website, but actually both types of codes have a vital role in your website and you have to know the difference.

Affiliate selling
So how do you make money from some of these voucher codes? Well you use something called affiliate selling. Here, you send your readers over to another person’s website, where they can make purchases of the goods that you are in some way recommending.

In return for sending your visitors over to their website, if the visitor goes on to make a purchase then you are paid a commission on that sale in return. Obviously, there is a lot of trust concerned with such a set-up in that the affiliate (who is sending the traffic) has to trust the merchant to correctly and fully track the visitors and pay the full commissions that are earned. But on the other side of this, it is in the merchant’s interests to pay the commissions fully to incentivise its affiliates to work harder and send more traffic.

Affiliate Directories
To make all of this system a lot easier to work with, most affiliate programs are controlled through large systems. You can sign up to two or three of these and get access to a whole load of merchants. And to add confidence to the set-up, the affiliate tracking is controlled by the system, not the merchant.

So what voucher code websites do is to provide a range of affiliate links to different merchants through major affiliate schemes. As they display relevant voucher codes the visitor then clicks the affiliate link and if they then make a purchase (possibly using the voucher code) then a commission is earned.

The Click To Reveal Question
The problem can be making sure that visitors do click on the affiliate link. A lot of people do not do this because they do not see why someone else should make a commission from them, even though they are happy to get the benefits of using the voucher code. This is the reason why some people prefer to use the click to reveal technique to make sure the link is used, but this is very unpopular in many circles.

Non Affiliate Vouchers
And what about those voucher codes that don’t make you money? Well these add to the mix and make sure that your site is different to other people’s websites. They give your visitors a reason to be there and although they don’t give you a direct income, they do give you better traffic stats.

Is it easy to set up a voucher code website or is it something that only the very technical can cope with? Can you make some money from it, or are you wasting your time?

Is it difficult to set up and more importantly, to make some money, from a voucher code website? To answer this question, we will look at the various elements an just how complicated (or not) each each and what is involved. So, to set up a voucher code website you need to complete the following steps.

1) Create a simple website
2) Find some affiliate merchants who supply vouchers
3) Display these vouchers on your website
4) Find some visitors to use the code

How difficult are each of these steps?

1) Create a website
This can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. At the very basic level, go to wordpress.com or blogger and set up a free blog and use that. There are plenty of voucher code affiliates doing just that. There is no technical know-how and your site can be up and running in 5 minutes.

If you are happy to get more involved, try the self hosted version of WordPress or even write your own custom site if you really want to. This step can be as complicated as you want it to be.

2) Find some affiliate merchants who supply vouchers
Very easy. Just look for an affiliate scheme forum that covers your country and look for recommendations for good affiliate directories. Join one or more of these and then sign up to merchants within the directory. Very easily to do, it just takes a little bit of research. Once you are signed up, many of the merchants will be emailing you with all of the new voucher details as they become available.

3) Display these vouchers on your website
How complicated this is will depend on how you have created your website. If you have used a blog, then it is as simple as creating a new post. Use your categories and tags to group together merchants to make it easier to navigate and use your website.

The only complicated part of this is getting the affiliate tracking code clicked. Some people use ‘Click to reveal’ methods, in which you have to click a button, which not only displays the code to use but also opens the merchant’s website as a link. However, although this makes sure any sales are tracked, it is technically very difficult and also not liked in many quarters. To make it easy to operate, just display the code and provide an affiliate link and maybe remind readers that if they use the link for purchases your website can keep on running.

4) Find some visitors to use the code
This is the hardest part of the process. From running Facebook groups, Tweeting latest codes, article writing, Search Engine Optimisation or just good old advertising. It is up to you how you create traffic to your website, but give some thought to it as it is the most complicated part of running such a website!

A lot of people coming to this site are interested in the possibility of setting up a voucher code website, I know that from looking at the search terms people are using and the pages that they are looking at.

So, starting next Monday, there will be a new series on doing just that, but in more detail than I’ve gone into before. It will tell you how to create that first website to display the voucher codes – for free if you want to – where to get them from and ways of starting to promote the website.

All very simple and easy to do and great fun if you are interested in making a small affiliate commission. So do remember to bookmark the site or subscribe to the RSS Feed and come back next week to see what is involved in setting up a voucher code site.

One very good way of making an affiliate income is through setting up a voucher code website. Is it easy to do? What does it involve? Where do you get the codes? How do you find people to use the codes? Read on for some help in setting up your own voucher code blog!

To begin with, a voucher code blog is just a big directory of affiliate merchants. Honestly, it is as simple as that! You just need to create a simple, but good looking, blog, sign up to a whole load of merchants and then each day add their voucher codes.

Build A Basic Blog
Many people do this for free with Blogger, or you could install WordPress and host the website yourself for a bit more freedom. Either way, it is free or very cheap to get started, especially as you can make use of some of the excellent free templates that are about. So the new blog will look fantastic, without having to employ a web designer to do the job.

Find Some Merchants To Work With
Next, go to an affiliate directory and sign up to as many merchants as you feel you can handle. Hopefully most will accept you and some of them should be sending you details of their current voucher codes for you to promote.

They do this to encourage you to promote their services, which you want to do. So go along to your blog and start posting about the current voucher codes that are on offer. A blog is an excellent tool for this on at least three grounds

1) It is easy to update
2) It can be highly categorized, to group merchants and types of products
3) You can make use of the RSS Feed to deploy the latest information to your reader

Finding People To Use The Codes
So that just takes us onto the last step of the process, finding people to read your blog, take an interest in your voucher codes and to make some purchases. There are two ways of doing this and you can use one or both methods

1) Try to attract visitors that are looking for codes for relevant merchants
2) Maintain a list of readers that are watching for the latest vouchers

The first method quite simply depends on a lot of Search Engine Optimisation for your website. Optimise it well and hopefully people will find your website. If the codes are interesting to them, they might even become avid readers.

To maintain a readership you need to provide quality content in a method that people can follow. Giving useful voucher codes that are relevant and up to date provides the content. The RSS Feed gives one way of accessing this data, whilst a newsletter, Twitter feed and a Facebook page are also other ways of allowing people to keep track of you and follow your latest codes.

Voucher code blogs are very popular as a money spinner, but I haven’t, as yet, found the best of the tools…

Voucher code sites, love them or hate them they are about and serve a useful purpose. For the consumer a discount, for the affiliate an income. But many voucher code affiliates do not have the technical know-how to build a suitable website from scratch, so that is where the blogging comes in to the system.

The Issues
The problem is, in the UK if you are displaying voucher codes you must clearly mark them as out of date when they expire and you must not use click to reveal when there are no codes to display.

You could avoid click to reveal, but then consumers find your site, read the code and avoid clicking your link. They have the discount, but you do not have your commission.

Click to reveal is an evil necessity. I know, I’ve tried working without them to little conversions!

What To Use?
But, I can’t find any suitable click to reveal widgets for blogging, worse still nothing that will remove it when it is expired.

Is it a big problem displaying out of date voucher codes? If you are in the UK, then yes! Be found out as a serial offender and you risk being removed from all affiliate directories and your chance of earning becomes zero.

Coming Soon, The Plugin To Solve The Problem
So, what can you do! Well, that is why this site has been quiet this week and will be quiet for a while, as I develop the WordPress plugin that will hopefully answer these problems.

I’ll publish it to a test site that I have already been running for several months and on these pages share the secrets of the success, and failures, of the different marketing methods employed.

If you have any interest in voucher codes, then keep an eye on the updates! The plugin will be made available on these pages once it is ready.