I recently got leaflets printed for Cashback Shopper and just had them distributed through a local magazine, which is delivered to 10,000 homes in my local area. The leaflets cost approx £170 & the distribution £290, so I’ve calculated that I need 100 people, or 1% of the recipients to sign up to the site, in order to cover my costs.

Although I’ve done some leaflet posting myself over the last year or two, this is the largest scale leafleting I’ve done & it will be interesting to see what results it obtains. I’m really running out of ideas for advertising which doesn’t cost ridiculous amounts of money (ie Adwords), or has little or no results :/

If I don’t cover my costs (again!), then I certainly won’t bother with this again & think I’ll just have to rely on totally cost free methods (???) or not bother at all anymore!

UPDATE – 5th July

So far, there has been no increase above the norm in the number of people signing up to the site. It looks like I’ve just wasted another £400! I really don’t know what marketing method works any more…..I’ve had so many phone calls from marketing companies telling me their wonder stories, yet not a single one has proven to be of any use whatsoever; all I’ve done is thrown money into a black hole it seems!

Cashback Shopper has just received its 12,000th member!! )

I’m really pleased to have reached this milestone, but don’t want to rest on my laurels as there are still millions of people out there that shop online & yet have never heard of cashback!

The difficulty is getting that message out to people! Until now, I’ve been focussing on the terms cashback, cash back, money back etc. but after a discussion with an SEO company, think I might change tack slightly and work on bringing peoples attention to cashback, by targeting those that are searching for related terms, but NOT cashback itself.

Things like discount shopping, money saving offers & discount codes ALL relate to getting money off your online shopping, yet aren’t people specifically searching for cashback & therefore may not be aware of cashback shopping sites at all!

Unfortunately, these phrases are even more competitive online, so how effective it will be remains to be seen. I’m looking into the article submission side of online promotion & I’m also considering some offline promotion.

I’ve got the Alexa Sparky ranking add-on installed in Firefox & obviously, the displayed figure is the only one you notice on a day to day basis. However, since my Cashback Shopper ranking started plummeting day by day (following on from the Google Vince update), from 205,000 at its peak, to around 460,000 & falling now; although my rankings for Cashback Shopper seem to have recovered & stabilised a bit recently, the ranking is still falling, so I decided to look into the figures a little more.

My attention was drawn to the following:

Cashbackshopper.co.uk users come from these countries:

• 77.3% United Kingdom
• 1.5% France
• 21.5% OTHER

and:

Cashbackshopper.co.uk traffic rank in other countries:

• 602,105 France
• 25,967 United Kingdom

This was very interesting – as my overall ranking is falling, my UK traffic rank seems to be rising! The last time I looked, it was over 28,000 & now is 25,967. Bearing in mind the fact that Cashback Shopper is a site for UK residents only, I can only assume that despite the displayed figure falling, the fact that my UK traffic rank is rising can only be a GOOD thing! My site is the 25,967th most visited site in the UK?

Perhaps I’m interpreting this wrong, but would be interested to know if anyone else has a view on this, or perhaps knows for sure whether this is the case or not?!

Today at 18:36 was when Cashback Shopper received its 11,000th member. Although sales have fallen off somewhat (probably due to the usual January hangover & current economic situation), I’m still hopeful that the site will still keep growing & that Cashback Shopper USA will take off as well.

The latest Alexa ranking chart has been published by Cashback News & I was very pleased to see Cashback Shopper reach the dizzy heights of 14th place (although it looks like a slight error means I’m really 15th)!! Bearing in mind there are now 124 cashback sites in the chart, I certainly believe I must be doing something right!

Although the top 4 are like the Big 4 Premier League clubs & always seem to be in the same spot, overtaking Free Fivers was a real high point for me as they”ve been running for years & claim to have over 231000 members!!

I just hope I can keep the momentum going….here are the top 20 sites:

1. Quidco 19,166
2. Rpoints 77,337
3. Top Cashback 77,558 – ↑1
4. GreasyPalm 84,226 – ↓1
5. MutualPoints 103,947
6. eDeals UK 105,981 – ↑1
7. Paypal Offers 108,107 – ↑13
8. wepromiseto.co.uk 139,736 – ↑11
9. Give or Take 149,208 – ↓3
10. Cashback Kings 187,600
11. froggybank 191,141 – ↓3
12. NHScashback 206,077 – ↑9
13. Comparison Plus 238,505 – ↑2
14. Cashback Shopper 244,859 – ↑12
15. MoneyBackMadness 238,770 – ↓6
16. RupizCompare 272,581 – ↓3
17. CashbackToYou 289,869 – ↑14
18. Free Fivers 299,035 – ↓6
19. Linemypocket 302,300 – ↓5
20. eCashBack 352,290 – ↓4

WIN £50! We are offering a CASH prize of £50 to one of our members & all you have to do to enter is refer your friends!

The Cashback Shopper membership has been growing & to celebrate, we have decided to offer a cash prize to one of our lucky members. All you have to do is refer friends & you will receive one entry into the draw for each friend who joins. Get as many friends/colleagues/complete strangers as possible to join & get loads of entries!!!

At the end of October, we will hold a draw from all the valid entries & one lucky recipient will receive £50 in CASH! No DVD’s, no vouchers, just cold hard cash )

Don’t forget that you earn £5 for every member you refer anyway, so it’s a win-win situation!!!

You can find your personal referral code here – if you choose to send e-mails to friends or post a link on your blog, don’t forget to use your referral code or we won’t know whose referrals they are!!!

Good luck!!!

In the financial world, the FTSE has key figures that the market use as pointers to whether the market will rise or fall over the next few weeks. If the FTSE hits the magical figure, then confidence rises etc.

So, I’ve decided to announce that Cashback Shopper has reached the milestone (albeit modest) membership total of 5000! Naturally, the membership of cashback sites is fairly fluid, with people switching from one to another to get sign up bonuses etc. but I’m pleased to have reached this total & plan to celebrate by running a competition on the site!

I will be offering a (also modest) cash prize draw – every pound earned in cash-back by members will qualify them for an entry into the draw. Luckily, eDealsUK have all the tools to be able to offer and administer this, built into their white label system & so I just have to offer & publicise the competition.

As soon as the competition details are finalised, I’ll advertise it both here and on the site, as well as by newsletter to the members )

It’s got to be something to celebrate, even if Yahoo only makes up a tiny fraction of the search market nowadays – something like 4% in the UK according to an article in Web User magazine. But what the hell, Top Spot is still Top Spot )

Cashback Shopper has just achieved the number 1 position for all the following keyphrases on Yahoo:

• shop cashback
• shopping cashback shopping
• shopper cashback
• shops cashback
• uk cash back
• cash rewards site
• extra cashback
• free cashback
• cash-back directory
• get cashback
• uk shopping cashback
• uk cashback shopping pays cash
• cashbackshopper
• cashback shopper
• earn cash back rewards
• cash back uk
• cash back shop
• cash back directory

and is in the top 10 results for 19 other keyphrases!!!!

It’s taken 9 months of constant promotion, blogging, marketing, seo etc. but it’s a nice feeling when the results are so visible. Will keep working at phrases that aren’t doing so well & the key objective is to start making a bigger dent in the Google SERPS!

The best Google positions currently achieved are:

cash rewards site 7
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopping 3
cashback shopping site 7
cashback site 3
cashback uk 9
earn cashback 5
extra cashback 4
shopper cashback 1
site cashback 4
uk cashback 2
uk cashback shopping 2

with 17 other phrases appearing in the next 2 pages of results.

MSN is a strange creature; I have about 13 top ten positions, but only 2 other phrases in the next 2 pages and a dozen or so ways down in the top 100! But with a only 3% of the search market, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, the aim now is to find the most searched phrases (& those with the highest KEI) from all these on Google & give them a real push to try & get them to the top!! With lots of FREE traffic up for grabs, this is the most important task for any affiliate marketer!

I’m sure everyone knows about the phenomenon that is Facebook! Now one of the worlds most visited websites, it seems that everyone & his dog is facebooking, poking, posting & answering incredibly pointless quizzes! Does anyone in Britain’s offices NOT have a minimised window open for a sneaky look when the boss isn’t around?!

So, when Facebook started taking ads, it seemed only sensible to consider this as a new advertising arena for affiliate marketeers. I originally set up a couple of ads for Cashback Shopper, but these were rejected by Facebook for contravening their terms & conditions / It would appear that because my cashback site contains a section on Gambling sites, it cannot be advertised, presumably due to the Americans laws on internet gambling!!!! Don’t get me started on how ridiculous I think that is!

However, I decided to leave the Facebook ads for a while but placed a few yesterday relating to My Travel Extras.

Facebook ads let you target the ad to a users interests, so I decided to create a separate ad for each product on the site. For example, Theatre Tickets targets “people age 18 and older in the United Kingdom who like Billy Elliot, Buddy Holly, Dirty Dancing, Going To The Theatre, Grease, Hairspray, High School Musical, Les Miserables, The Lion King, London, Lord Of The Rings, Musical Theater, Musical Theatre, Musicals, Nights Out, Oliver, Oliver Twist, Phantom Of The Opera, Restaurants, The Sound Of Music, Theater, Theatre, or Wicked.”

Facebook’s ad creation system is VERY picky about punctuation & proper use of capitals & symbols, so a few mistakes led to repeated rejections & a lot of frustration! However, once you are familiar with what you can & can’t do, it was pretty straightforward to create ads for Theatre Tickets, Car Hire, Theme Park Breaks, London Theatre Breaks, Airport Parking, Airport Hotels, Airport Lounges & Short Breaks.

Initial assessment of the stats shows that click through rates are pretty low compared to what you would be aiming for from Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, so the jury is still out. The best result so far is from Airport Lounges, with 0.12% click throughs! I’ll give the ads a week to see if they are worth continuing with.

A while back I bought the domain cashbackshopper.co.uk for my cashback internet shopping site, which offers cash to members who buy products online from our wide range of retailers.

I had looked for the cashbackshopper.com address but found it was already owned by another company, but not in use. There are a number of companies out there that bought hundreds, if not thousands of domains & then sell them on, or wait for them to become valuable/desirable & therefore worth a lot of money!

I wrote to the company & as is the norm in these cases, months went by with no response. I decided it wasn’t worth pursuing as it would make little difference to my UK site.

However, out of the blue, the company contacted me & said they would be willing to sell the domain for $3000 (£1500). Apparently, an American cashback site had offered to buy it & I suspected they were trying to start a bidding war. Interestingly they told me that eDealsUK were planning to launch an American version of their site, with the possibility of a white label offering to follow! This made a big difference as a .com domain would be very useful for a US market & I didn’t want to have to think up some other name, bearing in mind it was likely to already be owned by someone else anyway!

I contacted eDealsUK to confirm what I’d been told & then started negotiations. Amazingly, there was no bidding war & I finally got the cashbackshopper.com domain for £1000 ($2000). I was worried at first, about spending such a lot of money on a name, but was re-assured by a couple of the posters on the Affiliates4U forum, that they felt I’d got a good deal )

So, I now have the cashbackshopper.co.uk domain for the UK market & cashbackshopper.com for the US site when it launches. No definate date yet, but the good thing about having the brand is that they can be linked so that if a user visits from the “wrong” country, they can be redirected to the right site!