If you are a regular customer of many larger consumer product companies, like Coca Cola, Walmart, etc., you may be lucky enough to be able to get a coupon when you purchase an item from them. Typically, coupons would be found in newspapers, magazines and the products themselves. Occasionally, you’d find sheets of coupons distributed in various ways.

Recently, though, coupons came to the Internet. For many products, you can search for coupons that can save lots of cash on up front purchases. Such coupons can either be used directly on companies shopping websites, or printed out and used at stores.

When I started out hosting my websites on Dreamhost, I didn’t know about such things! Apparently, there are lots of coupon codes for such companies. Search through this blog to find several such coupon companies, and see the list of companies that offer coupons.

If you are disciplined, you could use deduct difference between the regular price and the price with a coupon and put that in an interest bearing account. Not only would you save money on your purchases, but you’d actually earn a decent return on the money saved. Of course, this would work best on items that are regularly purchased.

For example, you get a 10% reduction on CouponChief’s website for books purchased from Barnes & Noble priced at $85.99. You get $8.56 savings which you put in the bank or building society account. While you won’t get top rates of return, you will still see 3%-4% returns on your income. Do that 20-30 times a year, and the amounts will add up.

But it isn’t the only way to make money with coupons. Occasionally, some sites will allow customers to create their own coupons and then give them away. One good example is Dreamhost which will allow you to earn money from referrals and has a coupon scheme, too.

The traditional referral scheme allows you to make a percentage of any sale for a customer whom you refer. But Dreamhost goes one step further. You can actually create your own Coupon Codes. I made several today: Blogger2yr and Blogger1YR

For example, Blogger2y coupon code will allow a new customer to purchase a plan and get $60 off if s/he pays for two years at once. This represents quite a saving: upto a maximum of about 46% (if my math is correct on the smallest plan!). That’s quite a saving over the 1 year payment for the customer.

Since the promo codes are offering upto a maximum of $97 per discount, that’d mean any customer who uses that discount would get a great deal BUT $37 would still go to the referrer!

I’ve found a few websites that are happy to take information about new coupon codes, too. So once you have created your coupon code, you can visit these websites and add your new code information there.

1. Redeem Coupon at http://www.redeemcoupon.com/ this website works very much like Digg.com. It was easy to get listed there.
2. http://www.couponshock.com/ is focused much more on hosting and domains. I submitted my listing but it hadn’t shown up by the time of this posting.
3. http://www.retailmenot.com/ is also a coupon site that offers a wide range of coupons, worth checking out, and worth submitting too.

So, look around for a coupon site to save a few bucks or use a coupon making facility at one of your favorite stores (such as …) to make a few bucks that way. Either way is good! Both are better!

Disclaimer: I am a customer of Dreamhost, and this email contains affiliate links.