That's great. I usually wade through Retail Me Not on my own, but it's time consuming to go back and forth to see what's available from different stores (and they try and hide the actual code). I'll give it a try next time.
They hide the actual code until you click on their link so they can get the affiliate traffic (otherwise people would just copy the code, and leave, resulting in no revenue for them).
Retailmenot was part of the inspiration for the site - I always found pizza coupons on their site to not be very accurate.
Great idea! Quick heads up, the SERP doesn't seem to load in IE9 (I know, I know...it's all they offer at work). All I see under the ad is "ding...)", so possibly some CSS rendering oddity going on. Email is in my profile if you want, shoot me a note and I can send over a screengrab.
Thanks for reaching out to me! I just replied to your email with more details, but this is fixed now - I was incorrectly placing the 'doctype' after some javascript, causing IE9 to fall back to 'quirks mode', which seems to disable css and js. Since js is used to load the results, the results never loaded.
Users can submit codes, or I add them when I see them on sites like slickdeals. I built a python backend that checks where a code works for new codes. After that, I have some methods so I don't have to check as frequently.
Users can submit codes, or I add them when I see them on sites like slickdeals. I built a python backend that checks where a code works for new codes. After that, I have some methods so I don't have to check as frequently.
I started it out about 2 years ago to help out people on slickdeals, and posted it in relevant threads. After the first few months, people started to find it useful enough to post it on their own on slickdeals.
Now it's almost entirely promoted by other people sharing links on twitter, reddit, slickdeals, etc. About a month back it got posted to '/r/YouShouldKnow', and got ~3k 'upvotes'. Didn't notice it was posted until I saw the big spike in traffic when looking at the stats for the day.
More recently I've been testing out reddit ads, but I need to work on my targeting (my ctr has been ~0.7%). Paid advertising is a bit challenging for a site like this since revenue per user is on the low side.
Thanks, really appreciate it! It's been my side project for about 2 years now.
It really started to take off at the beginning of this year when I started to rank well for relevant keywords. This past summer, I switched domains to make it more memorable, and my ranking suffered pretty severely.
My rank in Google search never recovered, but my traffic from other sources / direct traffic has increased quite substantially such that this doesn't matter anymore.
Google analytics showed a decent amount of traffic from users searching for asliceofpizza, abitofpizza, etc, and I talked to some users that indicated they had trouble remembering the domain. Bought the new domain for ~$600 over the summer.
My direct traffic has increased a lot since then, so I'm inclined to say it helped.
Yeah, I did a 301 permanent redirect (the redirect is still there too), redirecting each page to the correct corresponding page on the new domain. I also told Google about the redirect through the webmaster's console.
I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it.
If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.
Have you considered working with local pizza shops or recruiting a "virtual" sales force to do that for you?
Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out.
So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places.
For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
You read my mind! That's my next plan for expansion, I'm just trying to decide how to approach it. A lot of the visitors to the site are budget conscious, so I'd really like to have coupons, etc for them (even if they aren't as good, etc), but people have mentioned that they'd love to have more local stores.
My current ideas are:
1. Use the yelp api to add local pizza stores to the current site - this is probably the easiest way to keep the database up to date. I could then reach out to local pizza stores, and try to get some promotions added. The biggest challenge with this is keeping the promotions for local pizza places up to date as a single person working on this.
One idea is to somehow encourage users to 'adopt' a local store, and keep the promotions up to date for that local store. Still trying to decide if there's a good way to do that.
2. Make the local pizza places a separate site / app and push users to use it for just finding local pizza places, less about finding coupons, and run it next to the current site.
Over the last few Google search algorithm updates, exact match domains (EMD's) were devalued. This could be one of the reasons why you are not ranking as highly for the term "pizza codes" while the previous domain was.
The deranking (and domain change coincidentally) were right around that time. Interestingly, I rank higher for 'pizza codes' now, and a lot lower for terms like 'papa johns coupons'.
My goal was to break $1k / mo by the end of this year. Last month I not only broke that goal, but more than doubled my next highest month.