Tipping points are a unique differentiating characteristic of group buying deals. The purpose of a tipping point is two-fold: 1) on the seller’s side, a tipping point ensures that a minimum number of buyers will commit to payment first before letting the deal go live, and 2) on the buyer’s side, a tipping point serves as an incentive to share the deal in question to allow it to go live faster. Theoretically, a tipping point works well in favor of the seller to increase sales and drive word-of-mouth marketing. Practically, however, a tipping point can serve as a deterrent to sales.

A tipping point works well when 1) the deal is in high-demand and unique (in terms of the discount amount, product/service sold, fine print, etc.), and 2) the deal is viewed by a critical mass of potential buyers. Both conditions are necessary to ensure that the set tipping point has a positive, not negative, effect on sales. If a deal does not have massive, targeted reach, a tipping point serves as an impediment to sales; it is unlikely that a small number of people would be motivated enough to share a deal in order to let it go live. In most cases, buyers simply want to purchase the deal without playing games with tipping points and time limits and other peculiar conditions.

Most new daily deal websites should in fact opt for no (or a low) tipping point. Tipping points exist to provide an advantage to the seller. They are tolerated by consumers with the bigger daily deal websites like Groupon, because Groupon has sufficient critical mass to demand that a certain number of buyers commit to payment before offering the deal. Smaller daily deal websites risk putting forth an image of insincerity, if they make their early customers go through troublesome hoops just to purchase a deal. At the end of the day, a tipping point may serve as a conversion killer or, worse, a reason for new visitors never to come back again.

P.S. Our findings are based on what we observe as a premium daily deal platform in our network of hosted daily deal websites. The bigger websites with more subscribers and traffic usually use tipping points beneficially, while the smaller websites tend to struggle more with sales when tipping points are used.

This article will address the most probable reasons that your visitors are coming to your website but not buying your deals, i.e. they are not converting. If you do not have enough visitors coming to your daily deal website yet (enough = at least 100 visitors a day), focus on marketing first: getting people to your website by promoting your URL on forums, engaging Facebook/Twitter fans, and doing PR for your newly-launched daily deal website. If you have been tracking your visitors using Google Analytics, and you have been getting sustainable traffic but have little sales, note the following list of conversion killers:

1. Technical issues are causing your visitors not to buy. The first issue to check is to see it is possible and convenient for your buyers to purchase deals on your daily deal website. As a premium daily deal platform, it is our priority to ensure that our hosted websites are technically flawless and 100% reliable. Reliability includes no dead links, fast loading times, no confusing user interface, and secure payment processing, among other important characteristics.

2. If people are coming but not buying, and the website is technically sound, the most likely reason is that the deal is not something that consumers want. The most obvious reason that people are not buying your deals is that you are selling something that has no demand within your subscriber base. Not selling something your members/subscribers want is a fatal mistake that would lead to failure. Just because a deal has a supplier does not mean that a deal has a buyer or that the buyer is easily accessible by you.

3. You are getting untargeted traffic. In order for your visitors to buy your deals, they have to be potential buyers. If you are driving traffic from sources of low commercial value (e.g. a teenagers’ forum, a non-consumer forum, using wrong keywords in Google AdWords, etc.), you will be wasting time, effort, and possibly money. Buying or importing a so-called targeted mailing list – no matter what – will bring you untargeted traffic at best. You may not be cut out to run a daily deal website if you naturally believe in buying a mailing list.

4. Your deals are simply not optimized for maximum sales in one or more ways. So many things affect how well your deals sell, including the presence of images, the use of videos, the lifespan of the deal, purchase count inflation, social proof like the number of Facebook Likes, and even the volume of fine print. Tweaking the small things can lead to big changes, especially when you are tweaking many small changes that cumulatively would dramatically improve how palatable your deal offering is.

The best way to find out what subscribers and members want is to talk to them. Email them, poll them on Facebook, or direct message them on Twitter. There is no other way to build a new business. In fact, it is very rare that any of our hosted sites actually do well without first engaging in dialogue with their members and subscribers. Talking to them and selling them the deals they ask for is a sure way to sell your deal.

In our previous blog post, we said that design is rarely the most pressing concern of any daily deal website. This article will put forth two simple ideas: 1) good design is design that makes money, and 2) design that makes money is data-driven design. Data, in turn, comprises qualitative and quantitative data, both of which are crucial to determine whether what you think is good design really is good design. While we are on this point, good data are also actionable in that they tell you what to do next.

Qualitative data are basically feedback and suggestions from people. User testing is the most effective way of obtaining qualitative data, i.e. paying just 5 typical users of your targeted demographic group to browse around your daily deal website. The most repeated feedback (e.g. “the buy button is too small”) should be the core design priorities. Qualitative feedback is the type of feedback with which we are most accustomed, and it is more useful when it can be obtained in aggregates. Individual or peculiar feedback should be analyzed with a pinch of salt – the key is to find repetitive feedback and work on them.

Quantitative data, the more-often-forgotten cousin of qualitative data, are basically numbers that measure the effect of implementing a certain design on sales and conversion events (which can be a sign up, navigating to a certain page, adding an item to the shopping cart, etc.). The most practical way to measure the effect of design changes is to use A/B testing, which not-so-coincidentally is also the modus operandi of all big successful websites. A/B testing, in the simplest terms, is to create multiple versions of the same website (e.g. each version has a different background color while everything else is kept constant) and send different visitors to different versions for the purpose of measuring how many sales transactions or conversions result from those different groups of visitors.

The truth is that every single design change you make, no matter how small, has an effect on sales (yes, even background color changes, fonts, element positioning, header content – we know this from experience in creating our daily deal platform). A lot of times design that looks good actually leads to lower sales. The only way to know for sure is A/B testing. The best way to carry out effective A/B testing is to use reliable tools built for testing design changes. Visual Website Optimizer (http://www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com) is a solution that we have used in the past that is user-friendly and competitively-priced. If you are serious about finding out whether your design actually helps or hurts your sales, you should have an A/B testing strategy from day one.

P.S. As much as we have lauded A/B testing in this article, do note that there are several disadvantages to A/B testing.

Daily deal websites are businesses, and the key to building a successful business ultimately rests upon whether it sells a product or service that is wanted by the market. Of all possible mistakes of running a daily deal website, selling something that is not in demand is probably the most lethal. The issue is that some new daily deal business owners tend to overlook this very vital aspect of doing business and assume that anything with a supplier or merchant actually has demand online.

First, not all products or services have demand online. Second, even if they do, it is very unlikely that new daily deal businesses have the necessary reach to access that demand. Third, another equally lethal mistake that new daily deal business owners tend to commit is working on the wrong things, i.e. not focusing on bottlenecks of the business.

It is safe to say that one of the biggest “comfort activities” that new daily deal business owners like to do, in place of the harder yet infinitely way more important tasks like sourcing for deals with an online demand and organically building up their mailing lists, is to tinker around with the website design. Of course, design is important for credibility and branding purposes, and having a daily deal website that looks less than pleasant is an eyesore. But improving the website design when it is already decent is not very helpful in increasing sales, at least not as helpful as building up the mailing list or selling something that is in-demand. The worst thing to do is to work overwhelmingly on design, when the deal inventory is pathetic and the mailing list comprises not more than a dozen of people, half of whom are friends and family or random people whose contact information was questionably purchased.

The point is that, if your daily deal website is not raking in a steady stream of sales each time you publish a new deal (regardless of how low or high those sales are), design is most probably not the problem. Craigslist.org and Plenty of Fish are prominent examples of how very simple, dull designs can actually make a lot of money. Websites with bad design that nonetheless do well exist. What does not exist is a well-designed website that makes a lot of money without a lot of list-building or marketing effort or even selling something people want. In fact, selling something people want and then marketing it to them (list-building) are necessary and sufficient conditions for you to make money. Design does not even come close in terms of importance.

PR is an aspect of a daily deal business’ branding that is so often overlooked by competitors that one can gain significant advantage by simply employing any strategy. While everyone is focusing on list-building and social media presence (as they should be), trying to gain niche-specific PR exposure can be a marvelous way to market your business. Here is a quick primer to getting PR coverage.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), getting PR exposure for your daily deal business involves more than just having a great story; you need to have relationships with bloggers and writers. Cold pitches rarely end up published. Also, press releases are arguably useless these days, given how overused they are and how thoughtless the manner in which they are used is (1 press release, 100 journalists). As the article above would tell you, writer selection is almost as important as media selection. Media selection ensures that you target the right niche (no point getting on a women’s blog if you sell men’s attire); writer selection ensures that you play within your league and approach writers worth approaching (i.e. they write about new businesses all the time).

Should you hire a PR firm? Yes, only if you have a great story inherently. PR firms are a good investment if you have a good story, but you simply need the right people to get to the media outlets in the right way. In a way, PR firms are like salesmen: salesmen cannot sell what is not inherently in demand, but they can help you sell what is in demand (but you simply do not have the means or resources to reach your target market). Business launches, new product launches, and business milestones are all plausible stories that might cause mainstream as well as niche media outlets to bite. Give it a try.

Jason Cohen, founder and CEO of WP Engine, recently blogged about copying as a method of learning the ropes of an industry. When we are new to an industry, we generally lack the ability to generate original ideas on how to operate in a market, how to build our mailing list organically, how to approach merchants, etc. “Copy first, innovate later” is not just a saying – it is an industrial strategy employed even by big companies like Zynga.

The right copying strategy must be employed to ensure that your resultant business is actually capable of handling competitive pressure. The three basic principles are:

1. Copy the right competitors
Are your competitors in the same circumstances as you, i.e. same/similar age, same/similar company size, same/similar industrial niche, same/similar products, same/similar funding situation, etc.? The best way to decide whom to copy is to focus on one competitor who is currently doing slightly better than you at the moment. The main thing to keep in mind is to see if your target competitor’s revenues are actually growing and that its reputation is improving among your target customers. Forget about copying Groupon.

2. Copy the right things
It may be difficult to determine exactly what your target competitor’s source of competitive advantage is, but generate some hypotheses and then test them by executing on your hunches. You may not be able to copy everything (marketing methods, designs, first mover advantage), which is why you should focus on the aspects that you 1) can copy with some effort and 2) actually believe are a source of competitive advantage. If you know of real customers who actually prefer to buy from your target competitor, talk to them and ask them why they prefer to buy from your competitor. Pay them, give them vouchers, and incentivize them to give you that information; it is invaluable to your business. Otherwise, talk to your current buyers and gauge their response to you implementing whatever you are trying to copy.

3. Copy the right way
When copying tactics and strategies, try to “innovate within copying.” Identify the aspect being copied, but execute it in a different way. For instance, if your competitor is using a Facebook contest to collect email addresses, copy the idea of running a contest but not the actual contest itself.

Copying should not be your main strategy, but there is merit in copying and imitation. Any daily deal website that has the benefit of learning from a slightly larger and more successful competitor in the same niche should seriously consider copying. It pays to be pragmatic in business so long as you do it legally.

1. You have no idea how to market your daily deal website.
You expect that online commerce is like offline commerce; you think that location and foot traffic will handle all the marketing for you. You are unaware that, if your daily deal website were an offline store, it would be situated in the middle of a barren desert, not in the middle of a bustling city (that is Groupon, not you). How do you market a shop in the middle of the desert? You go out and make yourself known. You go to a city location (Facebook) and grab some people, hoping that they will want to take the effort to go to your in-the-middle-of-nowhere store. You go to crowded coffee shops (forums) and politely tell people about your shop 10,000 miles away. You publish yourself in the Yellow Pages (SEO/Google). You need to get out of your store; having the perfect store with perfect goods will not matter one bit if people do not even know about your store. Get out and market it well.

2. You think because you spam deals to 10,000 people, 50 are bound to buy.
You think very highly of your purchased/transplanted mailing lists, because they are sold as “highly-qualified leads” and cost a bomb. You really think that spamming is a good business strategy and that it has very little effect on your reputation. You are unaware that, even if 10,000 emails reach the inbox of 10,000 people, only maybe 9,000 check their inbox regularly, 100 would even care to open unsolicited email, 10 would click on the link within, and exactly 0 will actually buy the deal. Even if 1,000 people go to your website, 0 people will buy if what you sell is irrelevant. Stop spamming and build genuine Facebook fans and email subscribers if you want to succeed.

3. You only want to do it part-time and invest neither time nor money.
You can apportion only 10 to 20 hours a week to build up your fledgling daily deal website. You are ready to put up maybe $100 a month for your expenses or initial investment. You are unaware that, if you are new to the daily deal industry, the bulk of those hours and money are actually used up for learning and experimental purposes and are not translated into actual value for your business. You underestimate the amount of work and money it takes to even sell your first deal, and you hope to just barely survive by owning a passive-income cash cow. You miss the fact that the amount of work and money you think it takes for your daily deal website to thrive is exactly the amount of work and money it actually takes for your daily deal website to barely survive. You are deluded about the money needed to be spent upfront.

4. Yet you think that money gives you all the advantages you need.
You are unaware that having money but not knowing how to deploy it is a surefire way to failure. You think that you can actually use Facebook Ads and Google AdWords profitably in the early stages. You believe that everything can be outsourced, since experts can do it better, yet you are unaware that nobody really cares about helping your business get out of the “death zone” that is the default state for all new daily deal websites, no matter how much you pay them. You think, just because you have money, your chances of success is proportional to the amount of money you spend, because you think that price is a foolproof way of measuring value.

5. You are stubborn and want to keep selling deals that do not sell well.
You think that just because your merchant cannot sell the goods in question well does not mean that you cannot do better. You are unaware that your job as a daily deal website owner is to bridge offline supply and existing online demand, not create demand for hard-to-sell goods. You do not know that you cannot conjure demand out of thin air. You believe that selling old, unsuccessful deals and reviving them will give different results, because your subscriber list is now larger or that you are now more established.

6. You think that, just because merchants like you, consumers will too.
You believe that having a large network of merchant-suppliers is a sign that your business will do very well. You are unaware that the best deals do not come to you; you go to them. You have only very fuzzy knowledge of what it takes to sell your green daily deal website to merchants, preferring instead to stick to merchants who are easy and available.

7. You think that past success makes the next deal more likely to do well.
You are in for a big surprise when you discover that, just because the last deal sold out and made you hundreds or thousands, the next deal still has a chance of selling a grand total of 0 vouchers. You are painfully unaware that each deal starts on a fresh slate; you need to know that people will not buy deals because of your reputation and popularity, but because they want the deals. You forget that the basics of keeping in touch with what people on the ground want still apply even as your daily deal website grow and flourish.

8. You have no history or a terrible history in online selling.
You also have a history of doing things halfway and giving up in the guise of “losing interest” or “other commitments taking up my time.” You have past failures in online selling, but you have not learnt why you failed and made the necessary changes in mindset or habits, or even intellectually acknowledged that you actually failed. Alternatively, you are new and believe that the best way to succeed is to emulate Groupon. Differentiate your offering, please.

The daily deal industry is not an easy industry to navigate, especially given how saturated it is and how quickly it is evolving. Avoiding common mistakes should be your key priority. If you need advice on how to start and run a successful daily deal website, drop us a line at info@zuupy.com. We operate a daily deal platform, Zuupy CrowdDeals (http://www.zuupy.com), so we pretty much know what will or will not work in the marketplace. Talk to us.

You may feel that there is an inherent paradox in selling your daily deal website to successful merchants; why would merchants that are already successful run daily deals? They already have more than enough customers paying full price! For one, you can ask GAP, Barnes & Noble, The Body Shop, Fandango, Unilever, Subway, Pizza Hut, etc. why they decided to run daily deals with Groupon. Here is a thought: the number one strategy to run a successful daily deal website is to sell something that people want, and there is virtually no better way to tell that consumers want something than the fact that they are already spending a lot of money on it.

Of course, selling to McDonald’s, Nordstrom, or Starbucks may be intimidating and almost always a futile endeavor for a fledgling daily deal website with only hundreds of subscribers, but consider the fact that there are many small brick-and-mortar merchants who are already doing well locally but never had the time or expertise to reach a broader market online. Your busy local grocery store or the flourishing eatery at the corner of the street, for example, may be able to benefit from some online presence. Situations like this are what daily deal websites are made for; it is the raison d’etre of daily deal websites to bridge the gap between offline supply and (existing) online demand.

Daily deal websites do not exist to find a market for products for which sufficient market research was not conducted prior to manufacturing. You cannot sell a solar-powered flashlight no matter how good your marketing and sales skills are. You need to know that what you are selling is wanted by consumers before you do business with the merchant, and, if the merchant is not selling the product or service well now, you have to justify it. The most likely reason is that there is no market for what is being sold.

Selling daily deals on behalf of struggling merchants is a lose-lose situation; it is weakness feeding off weakness and the blind leading the blind. Again, one of the most likely reasons that the merchant is not doing well in the first place is that whatever she is selling is not in demand in the marketplace. As a new and inexperienced player in the daily deal industry, your best bet for survival is to partner with a more successful party to maximize your chances of success instead of being dragged down or suppressed by incompetent partner merchants. Doing business with merchants who are too easy to sell to (or, worse, merchants who come to you to sell their goods when you are still a very small daily deal website) is not a good business strategy.

In a way, our business growth as a growing daily deal platform hosting more than 300 daily deal websites also depends on hosting only daily deal websites that are destined to be successful. Daily deal websites that are destined to be successful are easy to spot – they have owners who are willing to invest a lot of time in the beginning to build up their following and a lot of money in the later stages to fund growth. In fact, one of the most effective ways to weed out non-serious daily deal website operators is pricing: by pricing our service slightly higher than what we would need to barely survive, we attract daily deal website operators who are willing to invest money in their ventures and to fund the development and maintenance of our platform to serve them better. We thus are able to markedly improve our software, which in turn helps our customers to grow faster – it is a win-win situation. Non-serious customers, on the other hand, are unwilling to invest money and time and are impatient about results, expecting over-and-above service (short of asking us directly to run their businesses for them while we pay them the profits every month) and placing fault on us when we have more than fulfilled our end of the bargain.

The same pricing strategy can be applied when you, as a daily deal website owner, are selling to merchants: charge a high commission rate to establish the image of an exclusive brand from the outset. That should weed out short-term-thinking, margin-hungry merchants who are simply looking for quick cash flow and not sincerely looking to expand their business online. If you sell to successful merchants, the chances of success is much, much higher, and that success would be attributed to you, even if only partly. Conversely, if you sell to struggling merchants, the chances of failure is much, much higher, and, worst of all, the blame for that failure will most likely be placed on you, even though you are not the limiting factor or the bottleneck.

We have hosted so many daily deal websites that sell dozens of deals with very few buyers; we also have hosted a number of daily deal websites that sell only a deal a week but always make thousands out of the deals. Do not just liberally sell deals for any merchant. Quantity is nothing compared to quality. If you want to build a respectable brand, you need to first respect your visitors’ time and attention by providing exclusive, high-quality deals.

Do not purchase Groupon Clone or daily deal scripts that cost upfront (albeit one-time) hundreds to thousands of dollars, especially if you are new to the daily deal industry, or, worse, new to online marketing/selling generally. Doing so does not align the interest of the vendor with the interest of the daily deal website owner (you). Once one-time payment goes through, vendors have very, very little incentive (whether they do so is another question) to support and continually improve the product for their customers, because their revenue depends solely on the acquisition of new customers.

Anyone in the daily deal industry knows that starting a daily deal website from inception all the way to the generation of sustainable revenue takes time and effort. Vendors that collect a large payment upfront have very little interest in ensuring that the daily deal website’s entire business and technical processes are well-supported. Furthermore, there is no escape valve for 1) website owners who eventually realize that creating a daily deal website is hard work, way more than they were ready to invest, or 2) website owners who eventually discover a better/cheaper/more suitable solution out there. Human beings have the tendency to mull over sunk cost (e.g. “I've paid $1,000 for this script, I better use it and make it work.”).

Buying whole scripts and self-hosting it is like buying an 18-wheeler tractor to drive down to the neighborhood grocery store to buy a candy bar; a bicycle or cab ride would have been more than sufficient. Learning the ropes of the business does not need to be expensive.

I believe that people thinking of entering the daily deal industry should know of all alternatives when it comes to setting up a daily deal website. I am writing this article just to bring to your awareness the lesser known alternative of daily deal platforms, like ours, Zuupy CrowdDeals (http://www.zuupy.com), ChompOn, DailyDealWorks, etc. that either 1) charge a flat, low monthly fee, and/or 2) charge a percentage of your revenue, both of which are aligned with your interests. If we do not support your business well, you either 1) cancel your subscription and cut your losses or 2) make no revenue, lose no money, and thus the vendor gets paid nothing as well, respectively. Besides, we are reputed to be much easier to use; everything is already set up or at least easy to set up, and you will never need to worry about hosting and server issues.

I am even willing to promote our direct competitors above for credibility reasons; go ahead and compare us to the rest out there and decide for yourself a solution that is suitable for you. We who maintain daily deal platforms work extremely hard to provide a platform that is reliable, constantly upgraded, and capable of generating sustainable revenue for our customers, primarily because our financial interests are directly aligned with yours. We earn our revenue from our customers in the form of small monthly payments or commissions by delivering value day after day, not sell to you with vague promises until you are finally willing to part with hundreds of dollars, a one-time event.

I just felt the personal urge to share with anyone out there who needs to set up a daily deal website for the first time the possible risks of buying scripts that you may not even be sure works. All daily deal platforms, including ours, let you try out our software for free for 15 to 30 days, no strings attached. If I can say something on behalf of my company and our competitors, it is that we are sincere in building a long-term relationship with you and helping you grow, because our very livelihood depends on it.

One of the most important factors that determine the success of your daily deal website is the size of your subscriber list. In fact, if you are not confident about building up your subscriber list rapidly to thousands of subscribers within weeks, you might as well not start a daily deal website. And building means building, not buying or transplanting.

There are two possible strategies to employ when building your subscriber list: organic and non-organic. Organic methods basically require the subscribers to actively type in their email addresses and click the subscribe button. Non-organic methods, otherwise known as spamming/cheating, basically involve spamming offers to people who never said that they even cared about daily deals, much less your fledgling daily deal website. If you are thinking about using non-organic methods, such as sending offers to your friends and family or buying a mailing list, just stop, unless you want to rapidly lose friends and money. It does not matter how big or promising your purchased mailing list is. You are a spammer. And no company has ever made spamming profitable. It will NEVER work. Or at least we have never seen it succeed, which says something, since we host more than 300 daily deal websites.

Now that we have gotten non-organic methods out of the way, here are some organic methods for your consideration:

1. Begin with a niche
It is surprising that many daily deal websites still dare to open shop and compete directly with Groupon or other big daily deal players. It is pointless – you will never win, nor will you even “barely survive.” The first step in getting visitors and prospective buyers to hand over their email addresses is to have a unique premise that captures their attention. There is a surplus of generic daily deal websites already; starting yet another is suicide. You need to differentiate your daily deal website in an increasingly-saturated industry by picking an underserved market segment: a geographical niche, a demographic niche, an industrial niche, etc. All things being equal, a generic daily deal website is much less likely to survive than, say, a daily deal website targeted at women selling health and beauty products.

2. Get impressions for your URL on the world wide web
People online are already too busy using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and 9GAG to even care about your new daily deal website launch. It is your job to go out there and make them aware of your new website. That means posting your URL on forums, blog comment sections, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion portals, like Reddit, according to your chosen niche in part 1. For instance, if you are starting a daily deal website for pets, post politely (and, as best as possible, be contextually relevant) on pet care blogs’ comment sections and pet care forums. Here is a workable plan: 1) google a list of blogs and forums dedicated to your niche and open the results in new tabs, 2) find a way to post your URL – register usernames if you have to – and do your sales pitch, and 3) keep doing it until you have posted 50 or 100 URLs for the day or whatever target you think is necessary to bring in traffic, even for the short term. And do track your traffic using Google Analytics. There is almost no other way around this. If you are hoping that your website spreads like wildfire through viral marketing or even pay-per-click marketing like Facebook Ads, fat chance!

3. Run lucky draws and free deals, amplified by Facebook and Twitter
People are already inundated with enough spam and unwanted emails to know better than to simply give out their email addresses. When you launch, people have exactly zero trust in your new daily deal website, which is why it is important to start small and start interesting with a lucky draw or free deal. People want to be enticed to care about your daily deal website. The bad news is that, either way, it is going to cost money. The good news is that spending money to entice people to give you their email addresses is probably more sensible and cheaper than simply spending money to entice people to come to your barren, boring website, e.g. via Google AdWords. Giving out one iPad in a lucky draw costs you a few hundred dollars and can probably net you 1,000 opt-in email addresses. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads? Never!

4. Great deals – sell them
Many players new to the daily deal industry expect visitors to give up their email addresses when your deal inventory is pitiful. Of course, selling to merchants is hard when you do not have a big subscriber list – it is a chicken-and-egg situation – but you have to do both simultaneously, because they are mutually-reinforcing. The more interesting deals you have, the more likely that you look like an established website and the more likely that people want to give up their email addresses. The more email addresses you have, the easier it is to work with merchants to sell their deals. Here is a tip: attack the merchant side of things first. Sell deals for merchants even for free at the start (if you need to) to get your hands on a great deal. By the way, if you need a guide on what makes a great deal great, here are some characteristics of a great deal.

5. Get a few large deal aggregators to promote deals for you
This method will cost money in that you will need to hand over an affiliate commission for referrals, but it is one of the best ways to reach a broad audience, gain instant credibility, and get not only new subscribers but also new buyers, without spending any upfront cash. Some examples include DealSurf and AllTheDeals. How do you convince an established deal aggregator to list your deals? Simple, by following parts 1 and 4 above.

Finally, half of knowing how to get subscribers is knowing how not to get subscribers. Non-organic ways should be avoided like the plague, just as a recap, but it is also important to avoid broader fatal mistakes that will indirectly hamper your ability to get subscribers and build your mailing list (here is a list). Good luck with your daily deal website!