Affiliate Programs for Coupon Bloggers

Coupon bloggers don't spend hours on end bringing you the best deals around just for fun. Some bloggers do it for a little extra pocket change, and some have even made a career out of it!

How, you ask?

Affiliate/Partner programs!

If you've ever wondered why someone's link to Coupons.com doesn't have the word 'coupon' in it anywhere, it's because it's an affiliate link. And non-blogger readers, don't feel duped! Understand that blogging takes a LOT of time and the little kickback (sometimes as little as two cents, literally) is hard earned, wouldn't you agree? :-)

Here are the affiliate programs I work with and what I use them for:



MySavings Media: Offers payouts for Coupons.com, Redplum, CouponNetwork, Cellfire, SavingStar, Coolsavings, Ebates, FreeFlys, various survey sites, Vistaprint and more.



Escalate Network: Includes Coupons.com, Redplum, Cellfire, survey sites, online games, other sites also offered by MySavings, Sunday Coupon Preview and lots more. So if they offer much the same, why have both? Because one may run a campaign for Home Depot and the other not, or one might have a $.50 per print sessions payout while the other only has $.35 per print session.



WeUseCoupons: Earn when a new user signs up as well as every time someone clicks your link. There are sooo many different posts you can include a link to WUC for! The database (if you don't have one of your own), a specific post, to thank a poster for that particular blog posts info... anything you find on WUC, you could stick your affiliate link in the post.

Commission Junction: Use for Upromise, coupons.com (called "coupon bar" on there), groupon and other daily deal sites. They also offer tons of online shopping sites, which would be great to have if you plan to cover Cyber Monday deals.

Google Affiliate Network: Soap.com, diapers.com, beautybar.com, target (for printable coupons - no payout for prints but bloggers use it just in case a printer shopped online as well), tons of online shopping places like CJ.

Troubleshooting Blogger to self-hosted Wordpress import

The move process wouldn't be complete without yet another snag...

There's a Wordpress plugin that enables you to import from another wordpress blog (either self-hosted or from a wordpress.com blog), drupal, RSS, blogger, etc. Makes it seem easy enough. Psh...yeah, okay.

There are hundreds of posts in the Wordpress forum with the same issue - google (and thus, blogger) won't allow users to use the tool.

The simplest solution is to create a dummy wordpress.com blog, import your blogger blog there, and then create an export file then load that file to your self-hosted wordpress. It's really not hard.

But affiliate links aren't allowed on wordpress.com blogs. And I have plenty of them.

After pulling my hair out and scouring the web for a resolution, I found this information and was relieved. Until I try to use the little Google App page thing with no success.

More hair lost.

But then I thought to try using the app thingy on Internet Explorer (I use Firefox - give it a two week trial run and you'll never go back). Alas! It worked!

But for some crazy reason, it stopped importing once it hit the date when I posted a few test posts on my new site. Still figuring this one out. First attempt shall be to edit the xml file and remove the posts that successfully loaded (after having deleted the test posts) and trying to import it again.

Fingers crossed

How to modify the footer credit in Suffusion

EDIT: This is for an older version of Suffusion. The latest version as of 1/4/12, you will need to edit the site-footer file. Again, it's still a good idea to create a child theme because you'll have to edit every time you update.

One of my final little fixes!

Customary forewarning: While I've learned a TREMENDOUS amount about building websites as I've constructed mine (ahem, myself...maybe I'm a little proud lol), I am far from being a highly educated, professional web programmer.

There were a couple of helpful Aquiod forum posts that pointed me in the right direction and I put two and two together from there... but it was still a teeny bit confusing, so here's exactly how it's done.

NOTE: Unless your name is Sayontan Sinha, you should leave some form of credit link on your main page unless you donate. Even then, I still think Sayontan, the Suffusion developer, deserves credit. So if you really need to completely remove his credit link, definitely donate a little and maybe even consider making a credits page for ALL your cool plugins and such. Don't worry about folks copycatting your site... anyone with basic knowledge can just view your page source and pluck out your theme and all those fancy plugins.

Now... how to modify that footer credit...

1) Go to Editor (under Themes) > Select Suffusion > Click the actions.php file.

2) Locate this little tidbit of data: (note that the data below has been modified to what appears on my website)

3) Edit the third line (td class "cred right") to whatever you want it to say... make it a clickable graphic, delete it altogether, make it say "Created by yourname using the Suffusion theme"...

4) Click the Update File button and refresh your website to see your changes. Rinse and repeat as needed.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You will need to change this every time you update your theme!! It isn't super often or anything, so no biggie. To avoid having to do this, you can create a child theme and the change will be permanent... but I've spent FOREVER building my site, learning the ins and outs of child themes will have to wait.

How to put different links in your header image - Suffusion theme

This took DAYS to figure out (which would have nothing to do with my lack of web techie education). The answer to my question was NOWHERE online and I couldn't even get the answer I needed on the Aquiod (Suffusion) forum.

Any tutorial type thing you might find on this blog probably involves "tinkering". I've learned that truly custom thingys in Wordpress (like what I'm about to demonstrate) are NOT cut and dry. One person's precise instructions will probably not produce the exact same result for you. Image sizes differ, back end settings for other thingys differ.... it's just not that simple. Which stinks. So what do you do? Tinker with things until you get the result you want. Change ONE THING - just ONE - save that change, refresh your page and see if your change did what you hoped it would. If it worked, hurrah! If not, change back whatever you just changed (even if it appears that it didn't actually change anything - whatever you changed was that way for a reason).

The following tutorial should work with any Theme so long as it has a Header Widget area. Specific instructions are for the Suffusion theme. This is what I did to make my snazzy self-made custom social media graphic clickable with the appropriate links to Facebook, Twitter, and RSS.

So here's how it's done (or how I did it, at least):

Start with no header image in your settings - no background or foreground images. Make the height of your header (the very bottom option in suffusion) and make it 1. This is all under Suffusion Options > Theme Skinning > Header

1. Create your image map. Put your desired image wherever you keep your other uploaded Wordpress images and go to http://www.image-maps.com. Plug in your image url and follow the steps to create your link map. (this part was the easiest - it was figuring out how to make the map cooperate with Wordpress that took forever)


2. Make your header widget area bigger than your image. Go to Suffusion Options > Sidebar Configuration > Header Widget and adjust the width of the header widget to slightly wider than your actual header image (mine is 80px wider with a 1000px image, if yours is 800px, try starting with 50-60px)

3. Put your image map into the Header Widget area. Go to Widgets, put a Text widget in the Header Widget area. Paste the HTML from the image-maps site into the text box. Do NOT paste the CSS or type anything in the widget title. Just paste the HTML and click Save.

Refresh your page. You should see your image and your blog title (text) in the header area.

4. Get rid of the blog title text. Create a transparent .png file that is 1px by 1px. (If you don't have software that allows you to make a transparent file, just make it the same color as the background of your header image. In my case, that'd be white). Save the little pixel file wherever your header image is. Go to Suffusion Options > Theme Skinning > Header and make the little pixel file your header foreground. I set mine to "Bottom Center". Refresh your page. You should see the text gone and just your header image.

And now the "fun" begins...

4. Remove the border around the header widget/image (if desired). Go to Themes > Edit Themes. Open your theme's style.css file. In Suffusion locate the below line. The border is probably set to 1px. Change it to zero. Refresh your page. The border should be gone.

And I think that's all!

I'll update with screen shots later. This was one of the last things that was keeping my new blog from going live. Now that it's taken care of, I'm ready to move!!

Subdirectories vs. Subdomains

At the advent of this blog, I knew that I wanted to have it connected to my main site, yet completely separate, and using Wordpress. I also wanted to have the Daily Deals page and posts completely separate. But where to put it? And how?

Everyone has seen subdomains and subdirectories... ie learningtheropes.peachysaving.com vs. peachysaving.com/learningtheropes

I knew one of the two would be the answer to where. I just needed to know which one to choose. 

I found a very clear, simple article that even I could understand. Check it out.

Since this blog is mostly unrelated to my primary blog's content (saving money, couponing, etc), it will be a subdomain (or is, depending on when you're reading this). Daily Deals is a subdirectory because it is relative to the main site.


The article contains more info on when to choose one over the other, and how it affects your search engine results (or SEO- Search Engine Optimization).

I followed the instructions provided by wordpress here to set everything up.

Thanks Best Rank!

Wordpress and Google Analytics

Visit Yoast!

I use a pretty complex theme on my new site. I'm still learning it. My Google Analytics wouldn't pick up any pageviews when I tested it. I downloaded this plugin from Yoast and IT WORKS!

Thanks Yoast!

About that tabbed link thingy in the sidebar

Warning: I don't know squat about Wordpress. But I'm learning.

If you want to see what I'm talking about, visit http://www.peachysaving.com/. If it's not there anymore, it's probably because I got frustrated and said to hell with it.

This post serves three purposes-

1) So that I can remember how I did it (and fix it when I screw it all up).

2) To share with you, so you'll know how as well. As a know-nothing newbie who just wants to get her blog running, this wasn't exactly easy peasey.

3) To support the developers of these free plug-in/widget thingeys.

I put this handy feature together using two plugins: Tabber Widget and WP Category Post List.

Putting the Tabber Widget together was pretty simple when following the directions in the readme file. I got it all set up and then I was stumped on how to list only posts from a certain category (see the HOT! tab). That's where the WP Category Post List came into play. I downloaded it and followed the install instructions. I stuck the WP Category widget into the appropriate Tabber box, adjusted the settings (following the readme file - note: READ THE README FILE for ANY plugin BEFORE you go tinkering with it... unless you actually know what you're doing) and joy of joys it WORKED!

Doing a lot of custom stuff to your wordpress blog is not for the faint of heart (or people who don't know squat about html, css, etc). There's a good reason people pay a lot of $$$ to have this done for them.