This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Oh, hey there. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, I am your host. Question for you, are you a coupon clipper? You like savings and deals.
I've noticed that people are either really into that or not into it at all. Gotta be honest with you, I used to be really into this kind of thing. I was frugal to a fault and had this obsession with free stuff for a long time, probably in my early 20s, extending for quite a while. You know those stories about your grandpa driving 50 miles to say 50 cents a gallon on gas. That was basically like me, except I wasn't a grandpa, I was 20 years old.
If there was free food involved, like I would do just about anything. There was a travel hacking deal once where I could pay $3 to stay at these really awful motels. Like they would normally cost $30 a night or something, but I could get $27 off. And I was like, awesome, this is amazing. If I ever had a bad experience, like if I ordered a pizza and there was something wrong with it, I would write a detailed letter of complaint.
Like I would use whatever creative writing or copywriting skills I had at the time, send that letter off into the corporate headquarters and they would usually send me back a coupon for a free pizza. These days, probably for the better, I don't have much time to do that stuff. But I do know that there are a lot of coupon and deal sites out there and you've probably seen them. In fact, you may have stumbled on one of them if you were ever searching for a discount code. Like you went to checkout online and there was a little field that said discount code or promo code, coupon code, whatever, if you've ever opened a new tab and typed in the name of that store, that merchant and discount code, you'll see this entire industry of hundreds, if not thousands of sites that list all of these different codes.
Well, in today's story, we'll go behind the scenes of one of these sites and look at how it works. What are the mechanics of this kind of thing? How can you automate it? Which is something that this person has done, really smart. And what kind of results can you see from it?
Well, results in action are what Sidus Will School is all about, so I'm gonna bring you that story in just a moment, quick little shout out to our sponsor first. [Music]
Antonelli Passani's side hustle had been a long time coming, 12 years to be precise. That's how long ago it was when she first bought her domain name, officialcouponcode.com. At the time she was working in marketing for a major retailer and saw all the people making money through their affiliate channels. And she thought, well, I want some of that.
So she grabbed that domain in hopes of cashing in on this revenue stream for herself, making a coupon site that was more customer friendly than the average one, which we'll come back to as we go along. But Antonelli was so busy with her day job that she didn't have time to do anything with that site. Seven years ago, she picked it up and worked on it briefly, but then put it down when she realized she still didn't have time. Then just last year, she happened to mention to some coworkers that she owned the domain. They basically told her she was crazy for not building it out and monetizing it.
Right around this time, Antonelli had also decided to strike out on her own and begin Eiffel Media, an e-commerce and digital marketing consulting agency. She was planning to take some time off to travel as she transitioned to working for herself. So she made a plan to finally build that coupon site during her trip. And the first thing she had to decide on was a platform. She picked WordPress for the flexibility and availability of plugins.
After testing out a few themes, she settled on a coupon theme that had all the options she was looking for and plenty of room to tweak as she grew the site. She did a lot of customization as she built it out further, mostly using free and paid WordPress plugins. She hired a friend to design her logo for a few hundred dollars and with that slowly started creating a more polished brand. Now, here's something important. With the base website in place, she needed a way to import and maintain deals that didn't involve her manually inputting data.
There are a lot of deals and discounts and coupons and promotions coming out every single day. So there can be a huge amount of labor that goes into keeping it updated, if you do it yourself. She did some testing, she tried a few more WordPress plugins, but finally she opted to pay for a feed service called FMTC. And I believe that originally stood for me to compete, but now they just go by the acronym. Now this feed doesn't come cheap.
It ranges from 500 to $2,000 a month, depending on options or what you need. But the quality of the deals was important to Antonella. And this service also comes with real people behind it who are testing each offer and providing quality content. Now this was a big differentiator from a lot of the coupon sites you see, because so many of them are super cluttered and have lots of expired deals. You go looking for a coupon code and you see a bunch of them, but none of them actually work, bad experience.
Next up, it was time to start applying to be an affiliate with as many retailers as possible. Because you see, that's how Antonella would get paid. People get the coupon code, they check out on that site using the code, and she receives an affiliate commission. But this could be a challenge too. She said the affiliate industry is a chicken or egg game.
Retailers won't let you into their programs if you don't have traffic or sales on the network, but then it's tough to get traffic and sales without good retailers. She says it helped to be persistent, to build relationships with some of the affiliate program managers, let them know she was serious about this project, and eventually she was able to get on to multiple affiliate networks. She now works with a whole bunch of them, including Commission Junction, Link Share, Impact Radius, Share a Sale, among many more. And by the way, I'm gonna include links to all of these programs in the show notes, in case you wanna try something like this yourself. Once she had her first affiliate partnership set up, she wanted to invest in a copywriter to help build out content for various store pages.
But that got expensive quickly. Eventually she found a US-based virtual assistant service, and was able to outsource some research and description writing to them for much cheaper. Her goal was to strike the right balance between providing useful content and discounts for customers, but also rank well in SEO, and all without burning through a ton of cash. With all these elements in place, Antonella was ready to start marketing. Now she did several things for that.
She told her friends, she used social media. She also paid for some ads, which was an initial investment that she's now dialed back on. From her background in corporate marketing, she also knew how to distribute press releases to media outlets. And all of that worked a little bit, but Antonella also decided to try a more unique marketing tactic. She ran a scholarship contest for undergraduate students, both to give back and to get the word out.
Each year, one student is awarded a few thousand dollars, and official coupon code gets some great press in a variety of different media outlets. One of her favorite ongoing marketing services is Herro, which is short for Help a Reporter Out. Herro has helped her get exposure on a number of great websites, which as she said, provided her with a great boost in SEO. Hopefully this Side Hustle School episode will help her as well. For those efforts in 2016, 12 years after she had first registered the domain, but the first year she actively worked on it, official coupon code cleared five figures in revenue.
Her initial investment has more than paid off because so far in 2017, she's actually seen a 300% increase in net income. Antonella believes that the key to generating more revenue with a hustle like this is continually updating the website with custom content, new links, new deals, and new retailers. And that's why she's happy with her decision to use a service, that feed, to help her update all that data. Also, since this is purely a side hustle for her, she thinks that this website is a long-term investment and a nice source of income for her frequent trips. Plus, she's already onto her next project, Fact Goods, which stands for Find a Cure Today.
And she describes it, it's a passion project that's more about seeing how much money we can give away versus how much money we can make. And that's a little different than what we talk about here on Side Hustle School, but I love the fact that she's able to start new projects and give back and do something that's important to her, all the while earning passive income from this coupon site. It's really good she kept renewing that domain all those years. [Music]
Well, really great case study here, I thought, because if you've ever wondered how these sites work, and I kind of knew a little bit about how they worked, but I didn't know all the details, it's interesting to see the differentiator that Anatella focused on in building out official coupon code. And that differentiator in a sea of hundreds or probably thousands of these kinds of sites is no expired deals and actually a good user experience.
If you've ever gone out and searched for a discount code, you may have had a bad experience. I certainly have, I've gone to a site and I'm like, oh great, I can save 10% at REI or whatever. Then I go there and it doesn't work. And I go back and there's a different code and it doesn't work either. And meanwhile, the user experience on that site is also pretty bad because the whole thing is designed for search engines, not people.
So it's almost like those sites kind of lure you there under false pretenses, these discounts that don't exist. And then once you get there, they have nothing of value to offer you. So of course that's not great at all. And meanwhile, the way that Anatella's project stands out is by creating trust. The site actually looks decent, the codes actually work.
I went to take a look at the site and right up at the top, it's like, we believe in quality over quantity. New coupons are added every hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Expired deals are removed 365 days a year. So thanks to that feed, that database, the directory, that service that she's paying, she's able to make that claim. So obviously it is a significant investment to go that route, but it seems like a really smart decision considering the vision she had and the need to differentiate in this market of many, many other sites doing something similar.
So be sure and take a look at it. I'm gonna link it up in the show notes. I'm gonna link up all those different affiliate programs I mentioned, as well as the service that provides the feed. If you end up starting a coupon site or a discount site or a deal site, let me know. Or if you already have one, let me know.
I'd be curious to know what your experience is. Whatever you're up to today, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Those show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/322. If you've got a comment or question, give me a call on the Hustle Hotline 8449 Hustle 4844-948-7853. I'd love to hear from you.
That's it for today, but I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
