I’m getting to be quite a fan of datafeeds for marketing. Sure they’re a lot of work, but they can also bring in the sales. And there are some great tools to help you along.

Now one of the first things you need to understand about datafeed affiliate marketing is that you cannot just throw up the entire feed and expect a ton of traffic. You might get bits and pieces but you really need to do something to make your pages unique. Without that you aren’t going to get the natural search engine traffic.

With some of my sites, the very first thing I looked for was programs with a datafeed I could use. That’s one of the things I love about ShareASale - free datafeed access for affiliates. Commission Junction only gives it to you free if you make enough sales. And of course there’s a lot you can do with Amazon or eBay feeds, although these are run differently from the ones at ShareASale.

If you aren’t a programmer, however, you’re going to want some software to put the feeds up on your sites. And you’re probably going to need to clean up the feeds (merchants can be sloppy with them) and figure out how on earth you’re going to make your little datafeed site stand out. We can’t all replicate the entire Amazon site, after all.

Here are some of the tools I enjoy using:

Build a Niche Store (BANS)

An absolute delight if you want to sell products that are being auctioned on eBay. I’ve reviewed this product in the past, and things have really picked up for me again since eBay’s transition to their own Partner Network.

You might be amazed at some of the niches that do well through eBay. You can get pretty creative with your sites. And the cookie is good for more than just the auctions you refer people directly to, so you never know what’s going to come up.

The Affiliate Datafeed Profit System (ADPS2)

My favorite tool right now for ShareASale datafeeds. It works within a WordPress blog. All you have to do is find the merchants you want to represent who have datafeeds, sign up with them, request FTP access to their feeds, activate the plugin and put in your information. These are all really easy steps, and many merchants auto-approve affiliates.

Once it’s set up, ADPS2 can download the datafeeds for you, and you click a button to have it create posts to the specifications you select. You choose the number of products per post, the number of posts created and the category posted to. ADPS2 will randomly date these, with a few being posted in the next couple hours and the rest over a number of days. How many depends on how many posts are being created.

You can have up to 5 merchants going on this, and the posts will mix them up. Keeps things more unique.

This is a great addition to a blog that you have some content already, and need products. As with many things It’s not going to do you a lot of good to use it without some content you’ve created and promotion of the website.

PopShops

The two systems above cost money. So now here’s one that can be free, if you choose. Or you can pay for additional features.

PopShops is nice if you want to use a datafeed from Commission Junction, LinkShare and so forth, but don’t want to pay for the privilege of accessing them. It also handles updating and removing products for you, which is very convenient when you’re using datafeeds. And you can mix the merchants up to suit your site.

The free version runs on JavaScript. In other words, it’s not going to attract search engine spiders for you. But if you have some content going and want to test the waters, it’s a place to start.

You pick the categories and your layout. Then the products. It’s a simple drag and drop interface. They brag about it being so easy a 3 year old could do it, and even have a video to prove it.

You can pay a monthly fee to get a PHP or ASP version for your site. This is, of course, much friendlier to the search engines. The Pro version is just $5 per month or you can go for even more features for $30 a month. But even in the free version all your commissions are your own. Just make sure you sign up for every program you put in your shop. You can even create widgets for your blogs.

The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to trust to their cleaning of the datafeed. But since you can mix up the products as you like you can still make some pretty unique pages.

Associate-O-Matic for Amazon

Now this is one I haven’t tried, but looks promising. The most recent update to the script was May 10, 2008 as of this writing, and it has been around for a few years.

It has a free option that costs you 10% of clicks rather than an upfront cost, or the full version is $99 for the first year, $20/year thereafter.

Amazon, like eBay, sells just an amazing range of stuff. The disadvantage is that they have a very short cookie life, one day as I recall. Compare that to 30 or more days for many other programs. But people trust Amazon, it’s familiar and they buy lots of stuff there sometimes. There are affiliates making very good money through that program.

Why Use Datafeeds?

With all this information about it, the reason why you should use a datafeed may not be quite so apparent.

A datafeed allows you to get traffic for the individual products, potentially. No guarantees, of course. But if someone is looking for a product they aren’t going to find your site if all you do is link to the merchant’s home page.

A datafeed site also has a lot of pages generated automatically for you. It can come down to more pages being more ways for visitors to find you.

No, datafeed affiliate marketing has not made me rich. It sure would be nice. But it has opened up some areas that I am developing sites that should bring in some income I’d have trouble earning otherwise. My datafeed sites have had some very promising beginnings.

A great niche is one of the requirements for a successful online business. You aren’t going to do well if you don’t stand out in some way or if you try to market to everyone.

Researching a niche is generally frustrating, though. Pretty much any niche you can think of will have a lot of competition in it. How are you supposed to stand out? More important, how are you supposed to earn anything?

One important thing to consider right now is that very, very few niches lack for competition anymore. At least not if they’re profitable. A great number of people have been trying to or succeeding at making a living online, and many of them have come up with some great ideas.

This isn’t as bad as it may sound. If someone’s making a living at the niche you wanted, you have know there’s a market there. If no one is, either you’ve stumbled across a very rare gem or you’ve found one of the many niches where there are no buyers.

The Big Secret - They Aren’t All Serious Competitors

Just because you see a website in your niche doesn’t mean that they’re serious competition. Many people do well in a niche because there aren’t any really good competitors in it. Just think about how many times you see ebooks telling people that all they have to do is throw up a quick affiliate site and they’ll start earning the big bucks.

If that’s your main competition, you may be able to do very well by putting in more serious effort. Go over what the competition is doing, and figure out how to do it better.

Sometimes standing out is just that simple. You find a way to do it better. You might provide better information, you might keep your site more up to date, you might be more helpful on a personal level.

Heck, you might just have a generally cooler site.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know about the Build a Niche Store software I use occasionally, and the transition of the eBay affiliate program from Commission Junction to their own eBay Partner Network.

And if you read around other sites, you may have heard many rumblings of discontent as many sites lost significant income in the process.  If you haven’t, I’m talking about people who went from mid to high 4 figures, to low to mid 3 figures or worse. It was pretty ugly, despite eBay’s insistence that all tracking was working just fine.

I’ve mostly been sitting back, gritting my teeth to see what would happen. I lost quite a bit of income in this process too. But I’m happy to say that I’m starting to see signs of life at long last.

Not quite the income from before yet. But it’s early days yet, as it’s been about a week of income coming in, more than the few dollars I got last month. Hard to say if it’s actual new sales or if they’re quietly correcting tracking problems. But I’m seeing a difference that I hope keeps up.

Affiliate marketing can be very interesting work, but it’s challenging too. It’s hard to sift through all the information out there and figure out what works for you.

However, one thing many people strongly recommend is redirecting your affiliate links. The logic is that many people just feel more comfortable clicking a link they can understand. Also, some have a bias against clicking a link when they think you might get a commission off of it, even though they’re no impact on their cost. Just an odd bit of human nature.

There are advantages beyond your clickthrough and sales rate to cloaking your affiliate links. I find it is simpler to remember my links. You don’t have to go looking for your link every time; just use the redirect link you created. If they’re well named you won’t have to look them up very often.

There are a number of ways to redirect your links. How you do it depends on what you’re comfortable with and what you can do on your server. You can buy a variety of solutions for this if you want link tracking, or create your own free solutions.

Free Solutions

The basic free version is to create a page and do a meta redirect. The one trouble with these is that they can be a touch slow. But all you have to do is create a plain HTML page with META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”5; URL=html-redirect.html” in it. The 5 indicates that the redirect will take place in 5 seconds, and you can bring it to 0 if you want a fast redirect. And of course if you’re directing to a new domain you will need to include the full address.

I’m most fond of the 301 permanent redirect using my .htaccess file. You can create one of these using Notepad (not Microsoft Word or other word processing software), but before you upload it to your server, be sure there isn’t one there already, as it will mess up your site if you overwrite an existing file with a new one that doesn’t have the current information. But if you have one there already you can edit it to add the new redirects.

The code is simple: Redirect permanent /filename addressyouareredirectingto. Once again, if you’re going off site that means you will need the full address. This works only on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.

You can also do this in PHP. Within the brackets to start and finish PHP commands, place the following code:

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

There are many more ways to create redirects, and if you aren’t using them already I strongly encourage you to investigate them. They make your affiliate links look cleaner and may help with your sales. Just check that the tracking is working properly when you use them.

Paid Solutions

There are quite a number of paid ways to cloak your links. The advantage to these is that some are stronger cloaking, and may hide your affiliate link even on the merchant site. However, you do need to be careful that your cloaking does not break the merchant’s Terms of Service. It’s a pain to have to change out links and find a new merchant.

That said, I found a couple that do look interesting.

The first is specific to bloggers using Wordpress. Wordpress Link Cloak allows you to declare keywords that you want linked to particular links. It sounds good to me both as a quick way to create links in a blog and to keep you from forgetting to monetize a post, one of my own failings.

The other that caught my eye is more general purpose. It’s called Super Affiliate Link Manager. It allows you to create cloaked links so you can brand them and track them. Being able to track your links is something I feel is key when you’re using a paid solution. It’s just nice to have a way to track your links beyond what the affiliate program itself provides.

No matter whether you go free or paid, take the time to cloak your links. It might just help you to increase your earnings, and make your site look a little neater.

As a general rule, I have a feeling for what’s coming in, moneywise. I know what most of my sites tend to bring in monthly and plan around that.

But there’s an exception to that, and it delighted me today with a surprise $1000+ commission check. Obviously a very nice surprise.

You see, one program I belong to doesn’t have a way for me to track my sales. I get checks pretty regularly from the company with records of my sales, but I can’t follow it online. Only the fact that they do pay well on sales keeps me going with them. Normally I do $50-100 per month with them.

So over $1000 was quite a pleasant surprise in today’s mail.

Of course I’m hoping that trend continues. That’s not a bad income at all for a site that doesn’t require tremendous maintenance. A little, sure, but less than many of my sites that earn less.

No, no clues as to niche or affiliate program. I get to keep some secrets!

I promised the other day I would post about finding great niches on eBay for people using Build a Niche Store. It’s time to start that process!

Check Hot Sellers on eBay

eBay makes this relatively easy in some ways. Go to the Sell page, and scroll down to the “Cash In!” section. You’ll see a link called Find out What’s Hot! There’s a ton of information there to help you figure out what you want to focus on.

Now there are a few big clues I can give you to help you pick. First of all, don’t go too general. Sure, lots of people buy iPods on eBay, but lots of people are trying to earn money through the affiliate program on them too. Go more specific. Tighten up that niche.

You can, of course, go for the big niches. You just have to be prepared to deal with more competition. If you’re just starting out, it’s generally a shorter learning curve and less frustrating if you start out with a smaller niche.

Another important thing is to pick something you will enjoy creating content around. While BANS creates a great site for you, you will still want some unique content that you’ve created on the site as well. You can buy and rewrite private label content, you can review individual products that tend to sell well, just create something more to draw the search engines and (more importantly) buyers to your site.

Now whether you create that content on or off your BANS website is up to you. I’ve done it both ways.

Also consider is whether the product is seasonal or sells well year-round. There’s nothing wrong with promoting seasonal products, but you should be ready for the impact that will have on your site.

You can see a lot of hot products by checking out the Hot Items by Category. It’s only updated every few months or so, so it’s not terribly accurate.

And here’s a biggie: eBay has a new Marketplace Research tool. It offers up to 90 days of completed sales data, average sold prices, top searches by category and trend graphs. It’s not free, but you can pick your subscription level depending on if you’re just doing some quick research or if it’s going to be ongoing.

For free tools, there’s also Terapeak. It will give you similar data, as well as the percentage of auctions that actually sell, which can help in deciding if sales are good enough in your niche.

The higher the percentage of successful sales, the better, but don’t be at all surprised to see many in the 30-50% range. Just wander through eBay and you can quickly realize that most products do not sell more than half the time. Many sell far less often.

The other metric you’ll be interested in, of course, is the average sale price. Since your commission is based off what eBay earns, which is based on the final sale price, you want good numbers here. However, a niche that is easier to dominate that produces a lot of little sales can be better than a more challenging one with larger sales. It’s all a matter of balance and personal preference.

Personal Interests

What do you like? Is there something you’ve bought on eBay? What do you see around your house?

It doesn’t take a lot of detailed research to find things that you know people tend to buy. Pretty much anything you own has the potential to be sold online.

Once you’ve found your potential niche, you can use Terapeak to see how well it does on eBay. Maybe it works, maybe you need to think some more.

What About Pay Per Click Costs?

Even if you aren’t doing pay per click, it can be interesting to see what others are paying for traffic on Google and other search engines. A niche with a large number of PPC ads on it is often profitable for those running the ads.

But sometimes a profitable niche has been missed in the pay per click market. This is more common on the tighter niches, another good reason to really work on choosing your niche.

There’s a free tool offered by Google that lets you check out your keywords. You can add in the average CPC in the filter section so that you can see what others are paying. Type in $50 for your estimated Max CPC to see what it thinks you would be paying for that keyword.

You don’t have to use pay per click to promote your sites if that’s not your style. Many do just fine with other kinds of marketing. But the data’s still interesting, and you might come up with a niche you hadn’t yet considered.

There are lots of other ways you can research a niche, but I find these ones work pretty well. The key is to get creative and find a topic you want to work on.

With eBay’s changes to their affiliate program, I’ve had to take some time with my BANS sites, getting them updated. But I also wanted to start some new ones.

The particular site I’m working on today is one I’d never switched to Build a Niche Store in the first place. I’d used eBay’s affiliate tools back before I’d ever heard of BANS. It’s brought in some sales depite being in Javascript, so it’s definitely a category I want to update to something the search engines will actually care about.

The installation of BANS is very simple. Create your database on your hosting, then upload Build a Niche Store. They’ll tell you to CHMOD the cont/cont.php file to 777, and the instructions tell you how to do that with your FTP program. It’s pretty simple - right click on the filename, select properties and change the 644 to 777. At least that’s how it works for me.

Then you go to your site and follow the instructions to install it. You’ll need your mySQL host and login information for this. A few seconds later, it’s all installed. Delete the install.php file and CHMOD the cont.php file back to 644.

Login, and you have one more very, very important step: Change your password. You can change the login name too, if you like, but since all BANS installations come with the same default admin name and password, changing the password is a vital bare minimum.

Next you’ll want to set up your store. I’ve circled the areas you need to fill out to get started.

There are other areas you can fill out, such as if you want to customize your site wide meta tags, but you don’t absolutely have to do that. You can also decide if you want open or closed navigation - that is, do you want links to all the categories showing or not?
The campaign ID you get from the eBay Partner Network, and you can follow the link to get your eBay category. Make sure you create a new campaign ID for every site so you can track which sites are profitable for you.

Hit Save once you’ve added all your information. Your basic store is now active… maybe. Some hosts need you to switch from normal mode to curl. That’s at the bottom of the Setup page:

Just make sure you customize it. The basic templates are very plain. I always change up the colors and give it a header graphic. In this particular case I’ll be coordinating it with the main site. There are several to choose from, so it’s pretty easy to find something that matches the basic layout of most sites, and you can customize from there.

Now I know I’ve skipped over one very important step - researching the niche. There are many ways to do that, and I’ll discuss it when I start my next BANS site.

One of the most delightful things about affiliate marketing is how cheaply it can be done compared to a brick and mortar business. Relatively speaking, you hardly spend anything at all; in fact you can get started for free.

But should you? Let’s take a look at how a free start goes.

You start out with a blog on Blogspot. You have a lot of freedom there, and so long as you don’t break the TOS, your site should be just fine.

Then you start posting in forums. Your signature link brings in traffic.

Add in some article marketing and posting free classifieds.

How’s it working for you?

Amazingly enough, these can all work quite well. It depends on how you use each technique. If you’re just spamming the forums, or if you just write junk articles that are little more than blatant ads for your products, you’re not too likely to do well. Produce quality posts and articles, and write your classifieds carefully, you can do better.

But it does take time.

Free classifieds aren’t for everyone. I know some people swear by them while others say they don’t get any results at all. Nothing wrong with testing them; just have an email account to associate with them so that if it gets full of spam you can cope with it.

It’s the amount of time it takes to handle forum posting and article marketing that can be the real challenge for a lot of people. Quality takes time, but junk is easy. You have to decide which you want to be associated with.

In both cases you want to lead people to click on your signature link or resource box, but mentioning that directly limits the effectiveness of your campaigns. Instead, you want what you post to lead people to be curious about what you’re offering, so that they follow your link for more information without you pointing it out.

Even though you may get immediate traffic from these, it takes a lot of time to build up to a decent level. And while you can get away with the free site, over time having control of your own domain and paid hosting is far more secure. It also doesn’t cost a lot.

Paying for these also makes you look more professional, which can matter more in some niches than in others. If you’re talking about how much money you make from home, do you really think a free site will impress anyone? Just an example.

Paid advertising can also get you a faster start. Especially in the case of pay per click advertising it can also eat through your money quickly if you aren’t careful. But if you can afford the risk, you have the chance to start earning within hours rather than days, weeks or even months.

The amount you should spend depends on what you are willing to risk. If you don’t have the money to spend, don’t. Given a quality product and the willingness to do the work, you can start out for free. But be prepared to spend extra time before you succeed.