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.

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 Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its affiliate marketing council (AMC) have established a code of best practice for the use of online Voucher Codes.

To come into effect on 1 January 2009, the Code has been created in response to a growing need for stricter guidelines in the area, and following reports that some voucher code sites are not adhering to best practice and are putting brands’ affiliate campaigns at risk.

At a meeting of the main UK networks held on 5 November, agreement was reached on a set of key criteria which will make up the Code, with an ongoing commitment to tighten these as the industry grows. Networks signing up to Voucher Code best practice agree that they will jointly enforce the code of conduct by not working with affiliates who do not comply with the following:

• Using ‘Click to Reveal’ when there is no valid or current code present is not permitted of affiliate publishers including using ‘Click to Reveal’ to show any deals/offers/sales instead of vouchers.
• Voucher code affiliate publishers must clearly detail the voucher offer that will be revealed by the click.
• A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for use online. This code will have an activation date and where necessary a deactivation date.
• Voucher code directories must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and discount codes.

At 19:08:32 on 17th November 2008, my cashback website received its 10,000th member!!! This was achieved in less than a year, as the first membership was registered on 22nd November 2007!

Mind you, there was a lot of hard work & plenty of advertising expense! I’ve even been leafleting shopping centre car parks in an attempt to entice shoppers from the stores to the internet, with the promise of free money!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the age of the site will come into play as time goes by – Google gives great emphasis to sites of a certain age & this helps improve natural rankings.

The continued exposure of the site & recommendations from existing members should continue to recruit new members, but there is also a lot of competition out there /

Hopefully the costs of advertising will be less than the revenue from the site in the long term & I’m still hoping to be able to get the cashbackshopper.com domain up & running in the US at some point.