StoreCrowd – $0 to $1M+ in Affiliate Sales in 12 Months

Hard to believe it’s been 18 months since I wrote a post here, some of you will probably remember that I was looking for a ruby/rails developer back in Feb 2009, then mysteriously I haven’t posted much since then. Well I thought this would be the perfect chance to update you on what I’ve been up to & also give you some insight into the last 18 months.

Back in December 2008 I was fairly annoyed that Coupon Websites were stealing from affiliates. I would say that in the last 18 months my view on this has changed quite considerably, however I still stick by my initial comments in that I disapprove of sites using Fake Coupons or using a “click to show coupons” link without having any valid coupons to show. Either way, I was noticing a serious shift in a lot of my affiliate activity, especially with PPS merchants that users were looking for Coupons & I was losing out on the sale. I knew I had to start offering Coupons otherwise my PPC activity was starting to become less profitable.

The last 18 months has been a whirlwind to say the least: I moved house, got a dog, got married, have almost had a baby (3 months to go) & also launched StoreCrowd twice. I also didn’t post here at all.

StoreCrowd v1 was Born

Initially I had to find a technical co-founder to work with, this proved fairly difficult & frustrating. A lot of the submissions I had were from the US, however after some time I felt like I needed someone locally in Melbourne to share the vision with. This proved harder, developers are fairly sceptical about you going to them with ideas as they get pitched to all the time. I emailed & met up with a fair few including heading to the local Ruby meetups to get an idea of who the gun developers were. Eventually I met a Java developer who was just learning Ruby, he was currently working for Microsoft & had a good grasp of not only the development side but also Front End/CSS/Javascript trickery (I found this to be extremely important).

It took us roughly 7 months of design/development to get an initial Alpha prototype up & running (we went through around 4 design iterations), this includes a fair about of backend integration with affiliate networks, deep links etc. I also started some pretty heavy blog posting over on the StoreCrowd Blog (notice that it’s not on a subdomain), I’m a fairly big believer that blogs in subfolders attribute much more authority to the root domain than those on Subdomains.

We learnt quite a lot of important skills during the initial Release:

1. There are a LOT of websites in this space & it’s not easy.
2. That if you spend time doing something manually, a developer can always automate it. For example we use the Analytics API to pull in data from the Top Content report & assign it to a particular store. That way I can focus on the Stores we generate the most traffic for.
3. A fair amount of Photoshop Trickery, I ended up doing all the designs & prototyping – it was too much of an annoyance trying to convey ideas to an external designer
4. Server setup & optimisation – Nginx/Memcache/JS Compression/CSS Sprites/Load Balancing/MYSQL Optimisation
5. How to convey development ideas into reality – this is a tricky one, you need to be able to explain exactly what you want & how you want it to operate
6. How to work with the Development API’s for all the major affiliate networks (Most of the API’s are fairly lame, Merchants don’t give you expiry dates etc)
7. There’s thousands of stores to keep updated & thousands of coupons come through the Affiliate API’s all the time. Automating this was key.
8. Learning to respect our Competitors & the way they do things, coupon websites go to great lengths to secure exclusive coupons with merchants. We need to ensure that these never end up on StoreCrowd.

We silently launched V1 in October last year & quickly started working on v2. We knew we were missing a large amount of features (we still are), but I was a big believer in getting a “minimum viable product” out there to see how we went. It was clear after a month or so that out conversion rates just weren’t cutting the mustard so it was time to start experimenting.

We initially experimented with “click to show codes” on coupons that we were making money from, we were using ClickTale to record user sessions & I could clearly see that a large number of users weren’t clicking or copying coupons. They were just reading them off the screen.

This almost doubled our click to conversion rate on coupons (notice that almost 40% of people who visit StoreCrowd end up clicking out to a merchant) & ensured that if someone was using StoreCrowd to find a coupon we would get the credit for the sale. If they found a non-working coupon for example they’re quite entitled to go to a competitor & activate their cookie instead. We keep a fairly close eye on non-working coupons via a real-time stream to try & keep things as fresh as possible.

The Road to StoreCrowd v2

October to Christmas was fairly slow, we didn’t expect Google to do us any favours within the first few months. Traffic started to pick up after the New Year, Revenue started to grow & we started building relationships with some key merchants. Exclusive coupons are the secret sauce in this business, if you can get a merchant to provide you with a coupon that no-one else has then you’re in business.

A few weeks ago I saw that Teenormous turned two & had done over $800k in affiliate sales. Brian had emailed me a few years ago & told me he was struggling to monetize the website, now look at what he’s achieved – quite incredible, they have built a great site in a fairly unexplored niche (Which can be easily replicated now, Teenormous is also built on Ruby ). Since I normally just track Revenue & the Commissions we make I hadn’t actually taken the time to check how much Revenue we’d sent to merchants.

Since launch in October 2009 StoreCrowd has driven over $1M in affiliate sales to our merchants & we’re doing ~70k uniques per month at this stage (without any PR). This is also not considering we get over 50% of our traffic & outclicks on non-affiliated stores, so I’m guessing that figure could be closer to $2.5M if you factor that in. All from a site that we hadn’t actually announced to the public yet. Consider this my first public announcement.

Did I mention that John and Myself both still work Fulltime & love our current jobs? Yes, this has all been done in spare time outside working hours.

In the last week we’ve relaunched v2 of StoreCrowd & also now have a presence in Australia. The new release focuses much more on the community & user interaction, something we knew we were lacking in:

1. Foursquare type functions – you can get hired & fired as the Boss of a Store
2. We focused on Email Alerts for new Deals & Coupons
3. A homepage that actually reflects the current popular discounts of the day
4. Laser targeted pages with good SEO Best Practices, Examples: Fabric.com Coupons, Register.com Coupons, Think Geek Coupons, Eastbay Coupons, Dell Coupons
5. Provide good tags/categories for different types of coupons, Examples: Car Rental Coupons, Travel Coupons, Tire Coupons, Restaurant Coupons
6. Users can now track how much money they’re saving with a specific coupon, they can also track if they submit something how much that coupon saves the rest of the community
7. We’ve broken out Deals to now include Store Sales & Freebies
8. We’ve broken out Coupons into Free Shipping / Printable Coupons
9. We’re really keen for users to Review their experience at Stores, so when you buy something we’ll ask you to review your experience
10. Heavy moderation – We want quality, not quantity. So new submissions go through a queue before they go live on the site. This helps us catch Exclusive Coupons & other things that we don’t want on the site.
11. A Bookmarklet – We have a Bookmarklet that auto parses store pages to make submitting product deals a breeze!
12. And heaps more!

We’ve got a fairly heavy roadmap & want to make StoreCrowd one of the premier sites out there for deal hunting. I thought now would be a great time to give you some insight into how we got here. I’ve always said in the past that Affiliate Marketing is becoming too generic, I think that if you can build a site that has a long lasting presence & provides value to your users you’ll make money without even trying.

Thinking about Starting your own Deals/Coupon site, here’s some tips that I originally posted on Abestweb

1. Try to avoid White Label solutions like WPCoupon etc, you’ll never keep up.
2. Keeping up to date with Coupons for us is a full time job for 2-3+ people
3. Keeping up to date with Deals needs 2+ people
4. Keeping up to date with expired coupons/deals can be problematic (no-one wants a site full of expired coupons).
5. Don’t underestimate the amount of work involved, especially if you’re not building efficiency with custom coded solutions.
6. Not to mention Merchant support & trying to get exclusives
7. Build a mailing list as early as possible.
8. Understanding SEO is a must title tags, internal linking are important.
9. You’ll need to know Adwords inside out if you plan to run PPC efficiently yourself
10. You’ll pull your hair out when you’re having killer days on CJ then all of a sudden your EPC drops 300% & they’re having “tracking” issues.
11. You’ll need to build authority & backlinks to even get a look in at high volume coupon searches (we began blogging a full year before we launched, generating over 10k natural backlinks). Most of which give authority but aren’t necessarily coupon related.
12. You’ll need a fair amount of time to contact partners & ask for backlinks. use Yahoo site explorer to generate a list of all your competitors backlinks (if they are linking to more then 2+ competitors then there’s a high chance they could link to you – could be a directory).
13. Have fun doing what you do, try & be unique. We’re putting our own twist on things & plan to expand into other areas that competitors aren’t looking at. These sites are all about building a community, without that you have nothing but search engine traffic.
14. Be mindful of Exclusive Coupons, don’t post your competitors exclusives (it takes hard work & effort to obtain these) – Here’s some other Coupon Websites to look at

I’ve opened the comments for this one, feel free to ask any questions below!