Earn by helping others save money

Want to make money by helping others save on their online purchases? Boy! That’s one way of making passive income as well as getting popular in college. No kidding. You can do this by setting up a coupon website.

Most shoppers end up paying the full price of items on cart pages. Little do they know that they can save anywhere from 5% to 25% using promotional coupons & vouchers. This is where you can jump in. You can give these coupons to your family & friends, and earn affiliate commissions for each purchase that they make.

Setting up a coupon website is not a layman's job. You need to be technically sound yourself or spend it on a developer. But, there is a secret short-cut which can help you start within a day. So if you are seriously interested, keep reading ;)

If you have the slightest idea of how to make a website, then you would have heard of WordPress. It is very easy to use, and most hosting providers give a 1-click install or pre-installed WordPress servers. You can create a website quickly. No wonder more than 30% of the websites on the internet are based on WordPress.

Now, although Wordpress started as blogging software, you can literally use it to start ANY type of business you want. Thanks to millions of Themes and Plugin available out there, you can extend it into a niche business website.

Coming back to our coupon business. All you need is this Wordpress Coupon Theme, so you can get going quickly. There are some other themes as well. But after days of comparing all of them, I found ClipMyDeals is far better than others in terms of looks and ease-of-use. It has the modern, streamlined design that tries to encourage individuality and customization.

So first you need to buy a domain and a WordPress hosting (or install WordPress on your server if you are a pro). Then buy ClipMyDeals and install it WordPress. That’s it. You will be done in a few minutes. You just need to follow their documentation correctly, and your website will be live.

Now that you have a coupon website, you need to populate offers on it. But I will come back to this later. First, let me tell you how you are going to earn money.

To get affiliate commissions on purchases made by your visitors, you can register on various affiliate programs. If you want to work with a lot of brands, then you can directly register on Affiliate Networks like Awin or CJ – who can be your single point of contact for all commissions from thousands of stores. They will give you affiliate links which you can use on your website. Every time someone clicks on these links and goes to an E-Commerce website, a cookie gets deposited in their browser. This cookie tells the E-commerce website that you have referred the visitor. Whenever this visitor purchases anything till this cookie is present, you will get the commission. Isn’t it simple?

Coming back to the difficult part of populating Coupons & Deals on your website. You have some options here, depending on how hard you are willing to work.

The most straightforward option is to visit various E-Commerce sites and collect their coupons & deals. But this can be time-consuming.

The second option is to download coupons from affiliate networks. A lot of affiliate networks make such aggregations available via CSV files or APIs. But again, this is slightly difficult. Because if you download all coupons, then you need to keep a tab of which offers have been added or updated lately. And integration with API needs a developer, which could be very expensive.

The third (and the best) option to populate your website with latest offers is CouponAPI.org. These guys integrate with almost all popular affiliate networks and collect their coupons & deals. For a monthly subscription, they will automatically add, update & delete offers on your website. And this is again where ClipMyDeals is such a help. They offer a 1-month free subscription of CouponAPI with every purchase. So you get a full month to understand how everything works without spending a penny.

Now you have a website, you have offers on that website, and you have registered with affiliate networks to earn money when people click on your website. All you need to do is spread the word among your friends and family. Once these people start using coupons & deals from your website before every purchase, you will start seeing commissions accumulate in your affiliate network. You can withdraw these commissions to your bank account as per your networks’ policy.

There is immense potential in coupon websites because so far people are not even aware of this concept. The entry is very easy if you invest in coupon themes and coupon feeds. I have seen people start coupon website from their backyards, and within months they have left their jobs to work on it full-time. So go ahead and give it a try. There is no better method of passive income today.