Affiliate Programs

I get emails all the time asking me how to take advantage of affiliate datafeeds that are put out by merchants. To be honest, how I use the datafeeds depends on my website and the merchant. I will tell you that I use a wide variety of programs and services when I use datafeeds. I’m just not comfortable with one program or service, probably due to all the different niches I’m in.

What Are Affiliate Datafeeds?

Affiliate Datafeeds are files that merchants provide that contain all of the products that they carry, or just the products they wish to put online. Typically these files come in a MS Excel format so that they are easier to work with.

Some stores, like BettyMills, have datafeeds with over 50,000 products. This means that once you get your datafeeds online, your affiliate store will be populated with over 50,000 items from Betty Mills.

A good place to find Merchants who have datafeeds is ShareASale.Com. Not all merchants have datafeeds, but you’ll find many on ShareASale that do. Simply sign up for their Affiliate Program and download the datafeeds.

Not All Datafeeds Are Created Equal

Sadly, not all merchants produce the same quality of datafeeds. A nice feature about the merchants on ShareASale is that you can preview the datafeed before downloading. The preview will give you a few examples of what the datafeed will look like. You’ll see some that have very lame or minimal descriptions. That’s okay if it’s a merchant you really like and you’ll take time rewriting the descriptions. The description is where the money is in datafeeds. More on that later.

Programs and Services That Turn Affiliate Datafeeds Into Web Pages

As some of you may recall, I did a review of Goldencan some time ago. It’s a simple service where you can put entire stores from different merchants on your websites. Just make sure you’re signed up with the merchants before getting the code for those stores!

Another program I used and reviewed here is PopShops. Generally Popshops works the same way as Goldencan but not really…if you can follow that! With PopShops you get the choice of using either JavaScript, PHP or HTML to insert products from datafeeds into your website.  Unlike Goldencan, PopShops charges money for their service (except the basic level which gives you minimum products) . The prices are very reasonable for what you get. You can start with the free package and later on, if you want more products, you can choose which package suits your needs.

Goldencan on the other hand is free to use. However, with some merchants Goldencan will take the 4th click as part of the “fee” for their service. Having said that, there are plenty of other merchants on Goldencan that pay their own way so that all clicks are yours. If giving every 4th click to Goldencan is going to be a problem, you need to check the Goldencan website before you decide on a merchant and see which merchants pay their own way and which ones will cost you every 4th click.

Another service that I’ve used briefly was DataFeedFile.com. I used them briefly on several Affiliate sites. This was a couple years ago and one problem I was having would be dead pages. By this I mean you’d click on a page that DataFeedFile produced and there would be no product, just a statement saying the file didn’t exist. I hate to think about how much that cost me. To be perfectly honest, the best I remember, all dead pages came from Performics, so take that with a grain of salt. It could have been Performics problem, I don’t know. I just know that I do not use either one as of now.

The programs above work well for most affiliate marketers. Having said that, with these type of programs I feel that you loose some control over the products offered. I like to tweak my datafeeds. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that you need to tweak your datafeeds to get the most money out of them so they will convert well. You don’t have that luxury with the above services, at least not that I’ve seen. But remember, they are easy for the novice to use, so there is a trade off. Control vs Ease of Use.

A program that I use that will give you complete control over your data feed is Webmerge. I guess that I would say that my biggest complaint with Webmerge is the lack of good video tutorials on how to set it up and get started. Webmerge can be a bear to learn, but once you do, oh boy, you have a lot of control at your finger tips. Webmerge does link to some third party tutorials written by other websites, but so far I haven’t found any good video tutorials. I think novices would eat this program up if they realized how much control they get to keep using a product like Webmerge.

With Webmerge, the program creates static HTML page for every product in your datafeed. It will also create static HTML navigation pages. Once you have imported your Datafeed into Webmerge and then went through the paces to export your finished HTML pages, all you have to do is upload them to your server.

Just over a month ago I came across a script that took data feeds and created dynamic web pages with each product. This script created a whole store from datafeeds. You can even have multiple datafeeds running under one store. This is great if you want a comparison shopping site.

The program I discovered was AffiliStore 2.0. This script makes it easy to import merchant datafeeds and turn them into working real time stores. You really need to go and look at their sample sites to get an idea of how powerful this script is.

I call this script BANS sites on Steroids because this script will build stores for you that have thousands of pages!

One word of caution though. In the AffiliStore forums, I saw quite a few people complaining about their sites slowing down or misbehaving when they exceeded 10,000 products. So if you have a store with 30, 40 or over 50,000 products, you may want to try it out with a smaller datafeed. On the two sites I used to build with datafeeds, one has just over 8500 products and the other has just over 6000 products and I’ve had no problem out of either one. So far in my experiments, it looks like this script will be damn good in targeting and conquering niches.

One of the best things about AffiliStore is that it’s free! Yeah, freakin’ free! That makes it better than BANS any day!

A Word About Affiliate Data feeds

I saved this for last because many of you, especially the new people, need to know this. I see a majority of you failing to do this and you’re leaving money on the table.

There are many so called “guru’s” out there that will claim datafeeds at unique content for your website.

I’m calling bullshit on that one peeps!

If you can download a datafeed from your merchant, then so can all 2000 of the other Affiliates that have signed up for their affiliate program.

Then what happens when say… 5% of those affiliates, including you,  publish those raw datafeeds? Yep…duplicate content and then you run the risk of being labeled a “thin affiliate site” by Google. Something you’ll always be fighting against.

The way you turn that datafeed into dollars is that you open the datafeed in MS Excel and pull up the descriptions. Once you’ve opened your affiliate datafeed, you’ll go through those product records and modify the descriptions to be SEO friendly and informative.

This will get you higher in the Search Engines. The higher you are in the search engines, the higher the traffic. The more traffic you have coming in, the more bank you take home!

I can’t stress how important it is for you to spend time customizing and seo optimizing these product descriptions. It’s not uncommon for me to spend a few days tweaking my data feeds. This is where your payday is at!

I’m also currently experimenting with a Affiliate datafeed WordPress Plugin. The jury is still out, but just as soon as I feel comfortable writing a review of this Plugin, I’ll let you know.

Okay, this should be plenty of information to get you set up and going with affiliate datafeeds. This is the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing. Now go forward and build your affiliate empire!