This is another that I have seen ebooks touted as a great passive income idea – lets put coupon sites to bed quickly.
The basic concept is that many merchants supply ‘coupons’ which can attract customers in with deals and bargains on products. The product may have a 20% coupon which gives the impression that the customer is getting a bargain and a great deal.
So if you think about it the ability to create a site with coupons listed which is basically the form of an affiliate website as you are sending people to another website to but a product or even spend a site wide coupon on multiple products
Issues with coupon sites
There are huge players in the coupon site space, lets look at some names.
ebates- massive site which has been on the go for years now
groupon- massive, global site
coupons – they own the domain name, lets not mention the amount of coupons they have
hotukdeals – big UK site where people actually submit the deals when they find them
RetailMeNot – claim to have thousand of coupons and they do.
That’s just a small selection and they are huge companies with teams of people finding and listing the coupons, try and compete with that. i very much doubt anyway could
A coupon site takes time to create, setup and populate with codes you have to find the coupon codes, list them and a key thing here – keep an eye on the end date. A lot of coupons only run for a limited time and you have to remove old, out of date ones. This takes time and effort and kind of kills the passive side of things off.
Traffic – since a coupon site in the eyes of Google is just a glorified affiliate site its very thin on content hence these companies spend a large amount on advertising and word of mouth via social media to drive the traffic to the site. This is another nail in the coffin for the passiveness of this idea.
Summary
I would not even waste my time with this type of site, the only way I could see coupon codes working is part of another offering. Lets say you flip sites for a living but do not offer hosting, maybe mention a coupon code which mentions a host with a discount.
Maybe on an niche site – depending on the niche a page with coupon codes for products if you can find any.
I’d personally just promote via social media like twitter or pinterest and just promote codes.