Datafeed Affiliate Marketing Basics

How would you like to have your own online store of products to offer your visitors? Sound like a lot of work? It doesn’t have to be.

Many online companies offer datafeeds. With a little programming knowledge or purchase of an appropriate program, you can quickly set up a website of your own with hundreds or thousands of products.

A datafeed is basically a listing of products carried by a company. It typically includes prices, links to images, descriptions, and any other information the company may decide is relevant to the product.

Depending on your skill level, you can manipulate the datafeed to make your website more unique or you can rely on a more simple presentation. There are programs you can purchase to set up your datafeed websites, but at the very least you should manipulate the template so that you are satisfied with its appearance relative to the rest of your website, or consider making it look reasonably like the store’s own website to ease the transition between the two. Of course, you cannot simply steal their layout or graphics without permission.

Depending on the kind of datafeed offered, you may need to run updates regularly or you may not have to do anything once the datafeed is set up. If the datafeed needs to be updated regularly, see about setting up a cron job to do the work for you.

Now, there is often concern with datafeed websites that search engines will ignore them, as the content is the same as on the store’s own website. This makes it vital that you add your own content. Once again, writing articles is important to your online success. Good articles increase your credibility and draw customers in. Newsletters also work well for datafeed websites. Consider telling customers about any coupons or special offers the store is having, or share news or other information about the topic.

One catch to datafeed marketing is that some places charge for the use of the datafeed. Commission Junction and LinkShare both require a fee to access their merchant’s datafeeds through them, although some merchants offer the datafeeds free elsewhere, so keep your eyes open. The fee may be charged only one time or it may be annual, and may be a couple hundred dollars.

ShareASale, on the other hand, offers free datafeeds. The merchants are often smaller so there may not be as much competition for their products, which certainly doesn’t hurt. Independent affiliate programs may or may not charge for access to their datafeeds.

Not a programmer? Check hotscripts.com for help, use one of the affiliate scripts at Recycled Talent, or if you don't mind static pages, use WebMerge. It can cost a little money to get started with these options, but they will save you a lot of time and effort learning how to do it yourself. Just keep in mind that if your program generates static pages it will take a lot of time to upload them and making changes will take more time. Static pages from datafeeds are best only if the information does not change very often.

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Datafeed Affiliate Marketing Basics

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