I recently relaunched http://www.easyonlinediscountcodes.com and did some SEO work on it. Within just a month or two, it has managed to reach 20th place in Google for the search term “online discount codes“, which has approx 8,000 searches per month & about 50,000,000 results to compete with on google.co.uk!!

There may be further developments with this site, so hopefully the content will become even more comprehensive & improve the rankings still further!

It just goes to show that there is definitely something strange going on with Cashback Shopper, as this site still fails to rank in Google, despite being optimised more than some of the sites that are actually in the top 10! It’s very annoying & my resolution for 2010 is to find out why.

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!

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 )

Matt Cutts recently announced on his blog that Google would be updating the Page Rank toolbar with its latest ranking changes (although these changes have been active for about 3 months before getting to us).

Despite varying opinions on the importance or validity of Page Rank, it’s nice to see that Cashback Shopper & FreshWebz have both risen to PR3!

Also, after dropping a few places (over 98,000) on the Alexa ranking, to 498,959 at the end of June, Cashback Shopper has pulled back up to 468,108 as of today. This is still the highest placed white label site in the Cashback News chart!

In an attempt to widen the net for my affiliate sites, I’ve recently set up a number of full page ads using the Pagerank10 advertising service, which they emphasise is NOT a paid links directory. They state that because of this you can get real targeted visitors to your website via the ‘full page ad’ you create. “Create Full Page Ads & Free Text Ads to advertise your website, products or services and receive real targeted visitors”.

The pages even have referral reports in the account control panel so that you can see how your site is being picked up & found in the search engines & which search phrases your visitors are using.

Each of the pages cost a minimum of £10 (£30 if you want one without text ads along the top) and can consist of just basic text, or can be designed using html. So far, I have created 8 of these full page ads, the first being for Cashback Shopper.

The first step is to choose a key phrase that will suit your site. Each pages’ URL is that key phrase, so you need to check what is available & what hasn’t already been taken. For Cashback Shopper, I chose cashback shopping site and since it was created on 23rd February 2008, it has received 593 unique visitors, directed from many different sources.

I’ve also set up pages for each of the My Travel Extras products:
airport hotels uk airports
airport lounges uk airports
airport parking uk airports
cheap car hire search
cheap flight tickets
discount london theatre tickets
short breaks

which have not yet received any visitors from the search engines (as they’ve only been live for a few weeks), but are receiving visits from other pagerank10 users.