The MerchantCircle Business Development Blog

Hi All,

We've been busy over the past few months and I wanted to give you an update on what's been happening at MerchantCircle as well as to inform you of an exciting new opportunity to work with us.

MERCHANTCIRCLE UPDATE

First off, great news on the merchant growth front: our merchant customer base has grown from 5,000 in June to over 60,000 today.  That’s over 6,000 merchants per MerchantCircle employee!  Our focus as we attack the Local Internet space is "Merchants First."  Our goal is to acquire merchants as subscribers as quickly and inexpensively as possible.  Today our CPA is less than $3/merchant – we want it below $1.  We ran some experiments over the past few months that have yielded some good results (and some good learnings along the way.)  We’re happy to report that we’ve picked up a lot of great merchant customers as a result of our efforts.

We're seeing a big uptick in traffic these days – doubling in the past month – as our efforts with SEO over the past year are beginning to pay off.  Further, we're now at a Page Rank 7, which obviously helps bump us up in SERPs.  Check out what Alexa shows about us these days here.

Over October and November, we have not been "seeding" merchant growth.  This means all merchant signups have been through organic or viral mechanisms -- both very inexpensive ways to acquire merchants.  The traffic uptick plus updates to the site have yielded significant improvements in both organic and viral merchant growth.  And, of course, they continue to drive our merchant CPAs ever downward.

As we look to Q1 2007, the path to blowing past 100,000 merchants under management is clear . . . and that goal will be achieved.  Exciting days are ahead.

THIS MONTH’S BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY

As many of you may have read my earlier blog post, MerchantCircle is happy to announce that we are now providing a free RSS 2.0 feed of our local merchants’ online coupons.  The feed is free for anyone to grab and distribute . . . the only thing we ask is that in exchange for our coupons you show us some “link love” back and do not unduly alter the links back to our site.

Some quick stats about our coupon feed:

·         Nearly 10,000 coupons were created over the past year

·         Roughly 6,000 coupons are currently active (implying most were created recently)

·         Around 1,000 new coupons are created each month

·         The number of coupons doubles about every 90 days

The feed spec can be grabbed at the following link: http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/feeds.html

If you have any business related questions, please feel free to reply to me at this email address.  Alternatively, I will be at ILM:06 in Philadelphia this week and would be happy to answer any of your questions there.

If you have any technical questions about the feed, please follow up with Wes Mitchell, our lead engineer on the coupon feed.  He is copied on this email.

Best Regards,

Doug