Open Letter To Michelle Dewberry and the people of Chiconomise

Dear Michelle,

Whilst aimlessly surfing the web the other day, I came across your new venture, chiconomise.  I have to confess I would have expected more from someone who made it through the gruelling self flagulation which is the apprentice.  The nation expected great things from you, Michelle, is chiconomise your magnum opus?

On the positive side it’s great to see that you have not been idle, and I am a great fan of being entrepreneurial (agency is the engine of mental development as my old lecturer used to say).  But why, oh why did you choose to launch a deals site?   I am no great expert on running sites like these but I reckon that it must be pretty hard to make a living from affiliate schemes and advertising alone.  No doubt it requires being really, really, really good at search engine optimisation and by the looks of things, you are not a scolar of the Google arts.

Having said that I think you have got some good content on the site and it’s great to see that you are making use of social media such as blogging and Twitter.  For starters, here are some suggestions for what I’d do differently:

• Landing page for each brand.  Currently most of your offers link straight to the destination website.  Check out what My Voucher codes do, they have a page where all the offers from a particular brand are located.  Bare in mind that in other ways My voucher codes are really annoying, like trying to flog me stupidly expensive advertising
• Improve your <title>s and meta data.  Get the basics right, it can only increase your traffic
• Don’t use images as blog post titles.  It may look cool, but Google can’t read them.  And incidentally how am I supposed to subscribe to your blog, there does not appear to be an RSS feed.
• Start a forum.  C’mon, you site is crying out for this

Bye for now,

Trevor