(Click here to scroll directly down to the list if that’s all you care about)

Someone told me that coupon sites are a great way to get additional SEO backlinks and eventually traffic. Building up backlinks from websites with high Page Ranks is how you get better organic search traffic, so said my renowned search expert. Coupon websites are a great source of high quality backlinks. Plus, you know, they have millions of people combing through the sites looking for deals, a small fraction of which might actually be looking for personalized books.

I’ll try anything to market my personalized books, I thought.

So I’ve spent the past week surfing through an endless number of sites of varying degrees of crappiness…and I’ve come to the conclusion that yeah, maybe they did help with SEO…in 2003. But I doubt very much they do anything these days.

While its certainly true that having promo codes for your online store on multiple coupon search websites will increase the number of people who find and try your offers, it’s totally not simple to get them listed on sites that matter!

What’s a small business to do to get coupon listings?

Option 1: Sign up to an Affiliate Networks.

Most of the large, well known coupon sites (RetailMeNot, Savings.com, Coupons.com, Offers.com and the like) are a bit of a closed circle mafia. To get listed you either already have to be a large, well-known e-Commerce brand (ahem, small businesses are not) or you have to sign up with one of the large affiliate networks, like the ones below:

• CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction)
• ShareASale
• Rakuten Linkshare
• Pepperjam Network
• Impact Radius
• Affiliate Window

(click here for a fuller list of all affiliate networks that might work for small businesses)

The thing is, signing up with an Affiliate Network is expensive and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s worth it for a small company. That aside, I’m not even sure whether they will let you into their network…unless you are big enough. Most of them don’t disclose pricing and require you to contact their Sales team (always scary). ShareASale was the only one that showed pricing on its site, and there’s a $625 sign up fee and a minimum commit of $35 / month. That’s not horrible I suppose, and I may yet try it, and I suppose if you really want high quality link-backs that might be your only option.

Option 2: Get a guy to do coupon submissions for you.

While googling around, I found a few links to freelance services that will do manual coupon submissions for you to a curated list of coupon sites they have, like this one from Fiverr. The prices are (really) cheap and maybe they know what they’re doing, but honestly it’s hard to say for sure. That being said, in hindsight I probably should have saved myself the week and just done this (read on for why).

Option 3: Do it yourself!

Being the stubborn, “wanting to get my hands dirty” type, I thought I should do this on my own. And so I did. I spent 4-5 days endlessly surfing the web, looking for coupon sites and then seeing if I could submit a Manimal Tales coupon to them. It turned out to be a pretty frustrating exercise. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, coupon sites have an inverse hierarchy of pain:

• A lot of the really good sites don’t allow for coupon submissions through their sites
• Of the ones that do, most have pre-filled Company Name dropboxes, and if you’re not already in their database, you can’t submit. (How do you get in their databases you may ask? You have to sign up to an Affiliate Network natch).

By now, most of those that are left are pretty sketchy and unclear quality…

• Of the ones that are left, a LOT of them just didn’t work or simply had really poor traffic so as to not be worth the while.
• What you are left with is a vanishingly small number of sites that seem decent AND accept submissions from the Web.
• BUT the kicker is that even for the decent ones that finally allow you to submit coupons to, you have absolutely no idea if they will even list your coupons! It’s at their discretion, and who knows if they will or not!

Which is where I am today. I have absolutely no idea if my four days of effort is going to yield anything at all (which is why maybe I should just get the guy - or suck it up and join an affiliate network). Anything to market my personalized books!

A listing of coupon sites to which you can submit your promo codes / coupon codes (updated as of August 2023).

Yeah yeah, all you care about is the listing of sites that do work. Don’t worry, I did all the hard work for you. In combing the web, I came across plenty of articles and lists: “105 Coupon Submission Sites”, “Top Sites to which You Can Submit Your Coupon Codes”, “Top Promo Code Sites To Advertise Your Business Online for Free” and so many, many more. They sounded great and I dutifully clicked through and tried a bunch. The only problem? Most of the sites they listed were either out of business, or no longer allowed for coupon submissions.

Oof.

So I went out and searched for my own sites that allowed coupon submissions - ones that worked and were somewhat decent looking sites. I figured I should share the love. Below are the sites that I managed to get to work. I will be updating this periodically as I find more (if I do). Enjoy!

p.s. Please don’t spam me or shout at me if these don’t work! They did for me! To be clear, they allowed me to submit a coupon - I have no idea if/when it will show up on the site! They're organized alphabetically fyi.