Id like to find out what it takes, technically and financially, to build a coupon site like RetailMeNot from scratch and have it listed in the top 5 of Google results for coupon + store name searches. Can anyone provide some insight or referrals?
This is huge project. I would say this could be a five-six figure project which can take 3-5 years of implementations. You need to have the good seller base and consistently build more value to your site while slowly increasing ranking in targeted keywords. There are no 1 best SEO methods, as you need to engage in several ways. Your competition is high with over 100k indexed pages and 200k backlinks. It will take time to get to this stage.
The budget with the best coupon on the market would be 1300$ ( automatic import of the coupons and self-promoting plugins that will distribute the coupons on different sites ). But this is only the start. What you want to invest in marketing ... I've never heard the phrase: your budget is to big therefor you can not advertise so much. My point: retailmenot is very big with a large community. It will take time to catch them. That doesn't mean you can't make good money from the first month you start! Making money only depends on how well updated is you site. Sorry about the bump did not mean it ... it's just that I've searched for something in the forum and usually the order is chronological. Not today.