Starting a deals/coupon site, great idea or ...?

The Hook
Whenever I'm in the studio that always one of the things we all ask each other when we come up with a new song idea.

Why I say this is because what you've found is a proven niche; whereas there is demand and others attempting to monetize it. So, (IMHO) in order to stand out in the crowd, you'll want some type of hook.

An example of a hook would be to find a way to combine all your research and create some type of meta-option that shows all the related deals to a product/service.

Another hook would be like the new service Bloopio that just came out. There's also a FireFox plug-in that does deal searching. Another service, (can't recall the name off the top of my head), that also offers an app that runs resident and pops up with all the prices found across the net, (of course not "all" -- but a good amount).

I think it was Howie Schwartz that recently predicted that shopping comparison sites will be the next hot thing in eCommerce. Same concept.

Good luck!
tecHead

Thanks for your response. You are right about the hook. Deals/Coupons is a proven model. I could go in several different directions:

1. Create a better mousetrap. Since there's so much demand I could get my share of the pie even with a generic type of deals site. Integrating price comparison into the deal site would be pretty cool and magnet for traffic.

2. Create a niche based deals/coupon site. think web hosting coupons, travel coupons etc

3. The tool bar/plugin concept is good. I will look into that as well. I think there should be a base site first and then tool bar or pluging can be sort of an extension of that. Or another way to send the customized deals to the users.

4. As a second phase, a forum could be added to the site to create a community around it.

5. A very important and crucial task is how to market such site? Word of mouth? Social media? may be offline, craigslist? Have you looked at frugalgirls at facebook, they have 1000s of followes/fans now.

From what I have heard, it becomes lot of work to maintain these sites unless you have a good system to (automatically) update the coupon/deal status.

Glad to get your brain moving. All good ideas, I'd say.

Seems to me that the ones that make the most noise on the net are the ones that take the road less traveled to get to the same destination. "The Hook".

As far as work; anything worthwhile is going to take a good amount of work. Yet, automation is pretty much the key to scaling.... and I think that's one of the beautiful things about the net.... it makes automating the scaling much easier.

Keep pushin'!

There are a lot of coupon/deals sites, and I actually know a few of the people who run them.

If you are looking to get rich quick right now, it would be kind of hard, some of these guys have been running the sites for at least 2-3 years (minimum), and actually have a staff that now helps run it, etc. If you like it, I'd say go for it. However, be prepared to be patient, because you probably won't make a significant dent when you first start.

You're entering a highly competitive market with a lot of well-established players. I'm not telling you not to do it, but spend a good amount of time analyzing the competition before you jump in head first. In your analysis, keep your eyes open for segments that aren't being well-serviced. Narrowing your focus could be what floats you quickly to the top.

John

I have a cashback site and looking to go into voucher codes soon. Profitable but much harder to maintain.

Especially a cashback website as you rely on cpa network pay outs. You also have to make sure offers are always running and not expired.

Then there's fewer incentivized offers than not. And then you have to make sure everyone doing your offers aren't doing it more than once so you don't top up their account twice or so.

Also most recognized marketing for this is to advertise through CPA Networks at 20-50 cents per sign-up. A way to make money on this is to add a co-reg system into the sign up form.

For example:

Person signs up with his Name, Age, Birth etc

Lower down I may have an offer from Orange offering free sims and free delivery. With this offer I add in the terms and conditions and then a tick box. If the person ticks the box. The person is giving us permission to use the details entered directly into the cpa offers. Meaning we get money for their sign-up, even if the traffic is incentivized and doesn't convert.

And example from a mates site:

LiveCashback - Free Cashback

As you see, the co-reg offers use your sign-up data to fill in the CPA form. Obviously these co-reg offers are discussed with the merchant before hand.

This way, the cashback site gets a comission, the user gets a free sim and orange get the possibility of a new customer.

I actually considered putting up one. But after checking what I'm up against, I decided to let it pass. I have to choose my battles and I agree with the comment above that you have to be prepared to be patient for at least 2 years.