How To Use Social Deal Sites To Promote Sales

One of the most common questions I hear is “But how can I make money by using social media?” Well, if you are selling goods and can offer up some great specials, there are some direct ways that social media deal sites can help you promote your product to hungry customers. Here are a few […]

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One of the most common questions I hear is “But how can I make money by using social media?” Well, if you are selling goods and can offer up some great specials, there are some direct ways that social media deal sites can help you promote your product to hungry customers.

Here are a few examples of social media voting deal sites. The main factor that drives the content for these sites is user generated deals and user voting that decides whether an offer becomes popular or not.

Deals Plus

This is an extremely well built site by Ben Chui, the man behind Bensbargins.net one of the oldest deal sites on the web. This site allows you to vote by “plusing” deals that users submit. If a deal gets enough votes then it is promoted from the upcoming section to the main page, or “Popular Deals” section. There is also a “top 5 deals” section on the homepage for the most voted upon deals of the day. Users can leave comments, and the site features a nice variety of categories for easy browsing.

Woot Deals

Deals is a newly launched section of woot.com, the most popular “deal of the day” site. This site has a selection of sponsored deals at the top and user submitted “community deals” section underneath. One of the nice features of the site is that any user with a Woot login can quickly vote, comment or submit deals to the site. The deals with the most votes are promoted to the front page. Users can also gain reputation points to build up their profile.

Dealigg

This site is a scaled down voting site, that again has an upcoming section and a front page for the best deals of the day. Commenting is enabled (although not many users comment) and there is also a top deals of the day column on the right hand side.

Dealighted

This site is very similar to the others, as you the highest rated deals from the upcoming section make it to the popular section. However, this site actually aggregates deals from major deal forums (slickdeals, fatwallet) and allows users to vote. Dealighted also includes information on the views of each deal, and also offers some bookmarking options so you can easily save deals. In the left hand column there is a “best of the best” section for the hottest deals, and there is also a heavily used forum section for the community to interact.

While these sites may only appeal to a niche group of marketers, they can be extremely effective in moving products and selling more stuff. A few things to think about when participating in these communities:

Don’t be too promotional. Submit more than just your own deals and really try to be part of the community.

Make sure the deal is easy to see from the submission. Trying to be crafty and only showing percentages or generic sale information won’t get you noticed. Make sure you show the sale pricing and the MSRP.

Offer affiliate commission. Having an incentive for site owners to make money is one of the best ways to get visibility on manually selected deal sites and won’t hurt your chances to get promoted to the homepage of these social voting deal sites.

Use coupon codes. Codes allow for you to have more tracking for your sales so you can really find out how well a sale worked by collecting all orders attributed to a promotion. So if you submit a code for social deal sites and it gets tossed around to other coupon-based sites like retailmenot, you will still have the tracking to attribute all sales to that original code.

Have a really good sale. Even if it is a loss leader, the better the deal you have, the better your chances are to get visibility. While you might not break the bank selling one product, you will have customers shopping on your site, and if you give them a good experience they might become a raving fan.

So for your next sale, keep these deal sites in mind and try to kick start your sales using social media!


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Finn
Contributor
Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides digital marketing and web development. He is a co-host of Marketing O'Clock and has been in the digital marketing industry for nearly 20 years. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.

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