Latest Passive Income Project - Online Coupon Exchange Site
As you can see I haven’t updated my blog for almost 2 months now for 2 reasons.
#1. I ‘d like people to get an opportunity to read the last post I made on building passive commission with the eBay affiliate program.
#2. I’ve just finished with a latest passive income project - A coupon swap website. It was an a project sparked by my wife’s idea. Now that we are parents, we started to receive all of these coupons for babies and parents in the mail. There were a few coupons that she could use, but many more that she simply don’t need, and many coupons that she wanted but aren’t in the mailer. My wife started “Googling” for coupon exchange clubs or coupon exchange sites, and to her dismay, there are a couple of forums for them, but not an actual website focused on just coupon swapping. *lightbulb moment* So I spent about a week and hacked together a coupon swap site and slapped it on a brand new domain. The monetization on the site is done by Adsense (I know, but it’s quick and dirty), and a CJ program. Is it profitable? You bet! And the best part is that the site is growing by itself because of the user participation and it’s completely hands-off. My wife is very happy to see there are actual users who list their unwanted coupons for exchange!
What’s the lesson learned here? Not all “junk” mails are bad. Go through them next time and maybe you will come up with your next big idea.
Hi - Great idea. What did you have to spend to get traffic initially?
Also, did you stage any coupons to start the site off or is everything there from the users?
Thanks!
September 27, 2007 @ 9:06 am
Hi Kirk,
Initially I used PPC traffic and bidded on coupon related keywords. I make part of that cost back from Google Adsense and the coupon bar program (see the banner ad at the very bottom of the site). When the site got indexed, I started to get natural search traffic.
As far as staging the coupons, yes, that’s a definitely must, otherwise I would not think people would use the site. I basically told my wife to go through her pile of coupons and post them.
Steve
October 4, 2007 @ 11:06 pm