Expired coupons can help your online sales

I’ve written quite a bit about coupon codes and affiliate marketing over the years and I quickly wanted to share an experience with the website www.Retailmenot.com.

About a year ago I decided to try out a coupon-code offer for my online business with Retail Me Not, mainly because in my experience they’re the biggest and most well-known.

It was a complete flop really, from memory there was just one person who took advantage of the offer while it was still valid. But it was also a dumb promotion – Friday 13th? What was I thinking?!

What surprised me was the fact that Retail Me Not have kept the expired coupon offer online, and even today, quite a few people try and use the expired promo-code when they’re checking out on my website.

What Retail Me Not have done, (very cleverly I might add and ‘hat’s off’ to them) is become one of my affiliates!

They have links from their website to mine, which delivers quite a bit of traffic each month. They’ve added my affiliate code to those links and if someone visits my website from theirs and buys a product, I pay them a small commission.

They keep on making money from the offer long after it’s expired! So smart.

And it’s not just Retail Me Not using this sort of tactic. As you can see from the screenshot above, Coupon Refund (who are also affiliates), do pretty well out of offering fake coupon codes for my business on their website.

They also happen to rank number one on Google when you type in my brand name and the word ‘coupon’.

Obviously now I made the connection between affiliate tactics and how much I’m paying them each month, I’ll start a SEO job of trying to get my own website to rank as high as possible for that term.

Don’t get me wrong, always happy to pay affiliates when they’re behaving themselves. The great thing about affiliates – especially the really good ones – is what you can learn from them when you unpick how they get such strong commissions.

Then it’s simply a matter of replicating their tactics for yourself to benefit your own business.

A number one rank for those terms above should see my online sales and profit increase even further. I’ll certainly be advising my eCommerce clients to do the same.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.