Travelling back to Leeds on Sunday evening, I picked up the Sunday Mail magazine that was left on the train table – apparently the cleaners don’t work on a Sunday – and was hoping this freebie mag would keep me occupied for the next 90 minutes.

A double page spread kept me engrossed for a whole ten minutes and it got me thinking in so many directions.

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The Orange Balloon Race is challenging people to fly their own personalised animals balloon across 1,500 selected websites that include Tesco, The Sun and my own ShopCodes.co.uk.

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It’s 10:30am and ShopCodes has already received more unique traffic than it did in a whole day in March. Yesterday was it’s highest traffic day since the heavy sales period of 27th and 28th December.

The majority of this traffic was not for people searching for codes. It’s Silly Sale Season and many high street stores such as Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins and Laura Ashley are offering up to 50% off.

My highly optimised site – for codes – is now converting visitors at up to 35%. So one in three of my sale-searching visitors are clicking through to the merchants pages and spending thousands. If only I knew this before.

You see I own a domain with the word ‘codes’ in it – a fact that will soon see my commissions being decreased by Dorothy Perkins – and I have always prioritised codes over any other type of promotion. This was down to the templating of my site and the fact that with a sale you just don’t know when it ends.

Only yesterday I generated £3,500 worth of sales to one of Dorothy Perkin’s high street competitors, netting me a substantial £400 worth of commission. And this was just one merchant, others which have not performed for me before have started to take spots in my Top 10 merchants list … once dominated by Figleaves and JD Williams.

This is not a fluke. Since my recent return of holiday I took a different approach to adding content to my site. As I had 3,500 emails to catch up on and hundreds of codes to add, I ignored them all.

I then worked on the last email in approach. So if the last email was about a code, I’d add it. If it was about top 10 products, I’d add that content. If it was about a sale, I’d add that content.

The result is I’ve a lot less codes on my site than I really should have but have now got a variety of alternative content, that is converting well

… with no ‘Click to Reveal’ in sight.

My ShopCodes site now includes the new Page Peel advertising format, which Webgains introduced last week into their creative mix.

I have long liked this format and now they’re being used by MyMemory, Viking Direct and iSubscribe.

I like these as the MyMemory ad specifically highlights their latest promotion, which happens to be a 10% discount code. So it sits particularly well on my site.

The Page Peel adverts entice web users to peel away the page, offering a unique and subtle way of enlarging the available page area. By hovering over the peel back area in the top corner of the page a new adspace is created.

The ads can be found under the ‘html’ type section of the Webgains link matrix. I’ve simply pasted the javascript code in the foot of my template file and it instantly appears in the top right of the page.

This painless task is a lot quicker than creating your own as the ad creators have trialled the design for the purpose. The Page Peel script is supported by all web browsers as it uses Adobe Flash Player enabling access to 98% of all internet viewers.

The benefits of using the Page Peel from Webgains are:

• Keep website space for your content
• Innovative design that arouses interest
• A clean method of advertising
• Complements other forms of online advertising (e.g. banners)

So thanks to Webgains and the merchants that have already embraced this format for the affiliate channel.