How to Incentivize Your Customers To Pay Now:

One thing you may have noticed in the world of travel blogs, it has been the addition of a free promo code at the end of posts. The travel blogger may give an in-depth review of his or her stay at a luxury resort, and then at the end of the post you’ll notice these promo codes that you can use to save a certain percentage off a stay at that resort.

Two things have propelled this new trend: acceptance of the use of cookies and a need for bloggers to help cover their costs.

1. Acceptance of Cookies – Most websites have a clearly visible ‘we use browser cookies’ on their front page somewhere, to the point where people accept this as the price of getting free entertainment on their favorite websites.
2. Bloggers need to cover costs – When blogs exploded in popularity in 2006, many people started up blogs as a hobby. Bloggers would shy away from any kind of affiliate marketing because it might taint their reputation in their readers’ eyes. But as Bloggers have grown older, they have growing expenses. And they need to justify spending time away from their families and writing for their blogs. In essence, the blogger market has matured.

Even popular fashion blogs like Fashionista.com will have links to coupon code sites for Starbucks. Which actually makes more sense than posting promo codes directly to your blog post, since these codes tend to expire within a limited time frame. Coupon code sites (like the one I mentioned above) make it their job to update these codes on a daily basis. So your customers will have a quality source to help them save money for months or even years after you first write your post.

Imagine what writing one post a day for a year will add up to in affiliate sales over the long term?

The drawback. Of course the main problem is that coupon code sites tend to have their own affiliate links, and the ‘last click’ is what matters for getting credit for sales. So in essence you are doing them a huge favor by sending them traffic.

Here’s what you can do: choose a quality coupon site that has updated coupon codes (you want to send your customers to the best, right?) and offer them a chance to be linked to at the bottom of their relevant posts. If the traffic to your site is good, most discount code sites would be smart to work out a ‘paid placement’ agreement where they either pay a set monthly fee, or share in the revenue that comes from your website (there are affiliate networks that can do this easily).

Here’s a list of what most people consider to be the ‘best’ coupon sites:

• CouponCabin.com – The site has a full time staff of experts who continually update their pages to be as relevant as possible.
• Retailmenot.com – The ‘king’ of coupon sites, Retail Me Not is backed by Google Ventures. It took a hit from Google Panda in early-2014, but the site rebounded thanks to imitating the format of….Coupon Cabin.
• eBates.com – Many customers prefer Fat Wallet because they share their affiliate revenue with its users! Here’s how it works: you create an account with a wallet, and then when you use their website for coupons, you get a percentage of the affiliate revenue eBates makes. It’s not much, but many people will only buy their merchandise through that website.