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!

In my previous blog(!), I had recorded details of Cashback Shoppers ranking position for various keywords. However, as that information has been lost forever ( I’m posting the rankings here for the first time!

Bearing in mind that Cashback Shopper was only launched in November 2007 & the amount of on-site optimisation was limited to just the front page by the original control panel provided by eDealsUK, I’m pretty pleased with how the site progressed. However, following a major rankings update by Google, the site slipped in and out of the results for a few weeks, but seems to have stabilised again now.

First of all, the site jumped straight into the Cashback News top 20 most visited cashback sites with an Alexa (Alexa rankings are only a rough indicator of how popular a site is) ranking of 400,468!! This put it above NHS Cashback (21st) & Cashback To You (26th), which are both run by eDealsUK themselves! As well as this, Cashback Shopper is the highest Alexa ranked white label site registered on Cashback News!!

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion in the number of cashback sites & Cashback News tracks the major news from the UK’s Cashback sites.

Their top 20 as at 31st March 2008 is:

# Quidco 25,348
# Rpoints 76,403
# GreasyPalm 77,747
# Give or Take 81,311
# Top Cashback 116,208 – ↑1
# MutualPoints 119,432 – ↓1
# eDeals UK 167,891
# Free Fivers 197,208 – ↑2
# Cashback Rewards 205,521
# Linemypocket 246,858 – ↑4
# MoneyBackMadness 249,117 – ↑1
# RupizCompare 265,300 – ↑5
# Cashbin 270,200
# eCashBack 287,635 – ↑19
# Comparison Plus 299,291 – ↑15
# CashbackChief 321,828 – ↑5
# Cashback Junction 333,294 – ↑6
# trollyCASH 375,873 – ↓7
# CashbackCascade 397,672 – ↑9
# Cashback Shopper 400,468 New

As some of the sites in the Top 20 have been established for many years & are all unique cash-back websites rather than white labels, I’m very pleased with my Search Engine Optimisation efforts so far )

Since this chart, the control panel for Cashback Shopper has been updated to Version 2 and allows for much more customisation of other pages. This can only benefit my SEO efforts & I look forward to the next chart which is due at the end of May.

But although this is nice to see, the most important “chart” is the one known as Google (plus Yahoo & MS Live Search!). So a regular rankings check on popular keywords will show how my site is doing in the search engines & what they think its value is for these key phrases.

Google
cash back 38
cash back shopping 14
cash rewards site 9
cashback 36
cash-back 39
cashback from shopping 48
cashback shopper 1
cashbackshopper 1
cashback shopping 15
cashback shopping site 12
cashback site 3
cashback sites 4
cashback uk 12
earn cashback 6
get cashback
online shopping uk 38
online shops 87
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 10
uk cash back 6
uk cashback 5
UK cashback shopping 4
UK cashback shopping site 11
UK shopping cashback 6

Yahoo
cash back 42
cash back shopping 1
cash rewards site 83
cashback 77
cash-back 44
cashback from shopping 23
cashback shopper 1
cashbackshopper 1
cashback shopping 13
cashback shopping site 5
cashback site 19
cashback sites 16
cashback uk 27
earn cashback 15
free cashback 6
get cashback 6
internet shopping 81
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 2
uk cash back 10
uk cashback 6
UK cashback shopping 7
UK cashback shopping site 4
UK shopping cashback 9

Following my long & ultimately disappointing experience of building a cashback site, I was browsing through the posts on the Affiliates4U forum & noticed a posting by Nadeem Azam, offering a “white label cashback site”, with a 60% revenue share for life! The white label was being offered by eDealsUK, who had been running their own highly successful cashback site for a number of years & was offering this with no set up fee or charges, other than a 40% revenue share. In short, they only benefit by helping you to do well ) There’s loads of information about their scheme at http://www.cashbackpartners.com

I contacted Nadeem & set the wheels in motion. Choosing a domain name was a challenging proposition as I assumed that anything with the word cashback in it would be used, or at the very least, be owned by a company that would expect a considerable amount of money for it. However, after trying a few “far too clever” options, I tried cashback shopper & found it was available as a .co.uk domain, for just £2.99 per year! Naturally I snapped it up as having keywords in the domain name is excellent for SEO purposes.

The site itself was set up very quickly by eDealsUK & was set up to point to cashbackshopper.co.uk. Then the real work began!!!!