Will Coupon Code Increase Your Affiliate Sales?

Today, I read Almed’s post about “What People Don’t Use Coupon“, and I finally find someone has the same thought as me that people actually don’t use coupon a lot.

When the first time I started running my web site and affiliate some web host offers there, I created a pretty comprehensive web hosting tutorials and start making some commission from my visitors. I found some of my competitors providing the coupon code, I thought some coupon code probably can help generating more sales, so I started to compile a list of web hosting coupon code and put them in my site.

The result was amazing, I saw the sales is going down significantly. Since it’s the only change I have made to my site, after 1 month drop in the earning, I remove the “web hosting coupon” page, and the earning is going back.

So, coupon actually doesn’t help on my sale, and below are some reasons I can think about:

• When people find a coupon code, if they want to use it to get a discount, in most case, they will start to search more coupon code in Google to find a best one, if your page doesn’t rank high in Google on that Key Word(such as “HP coupon”), your sale will be stolen by the other web site.
• Sometime, people just doesn’t trust you when you provide them with coupon code or discount, they will double on your introduction about the product.

So, I think the coupon code actually won’t contribute a lot to your affiliate sale, actually, it might hurt you if you are not doing good job on the SEO for the related key word.