Aspects of Home Business Blog

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.

Tags: adps, build a niche store, datafeeds, ebay

Having a website can sound like a big deal if you’ve never had one before. You look around, and you see all these huge websites with thousands of pages. Is that what you need to do?

No. Fortunately it isn’t.

How complex your website needs to be depends on what you need from it. If you’re going to be an online writer and want your own site, just a page or two explaining your services is plenty to get things going. But if you’re going to be selling things, you will need a more complex site. How complex depends on how complete it needs to be for you to get a start.

Example 1: An Affiliate Website

If you’re going to be doing affiliate sales, you need a site that drives traffic through your links and helps you to build a list. But we’ll take the building the website step first.

There are a couple of ways to build an affiliate website. I suggest reading Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook if this is the kind of marketing you want to do. It’s a good place to get some solid information if you aren’t experienced in the affiliate arena.

One way is to build a site with product reviews. This kind of site can be started pretty small. Just start working on reviewing the kinds of products you want to sell. I suggest one review per page, and if the items are competing, a page where you compare them.

Another way is to use datafeeds in one form or another. Datafeeds allow you to create very large sites very quickly. There are some advantages to that, but they can also be a lot of work. Then again, there are a lot of tools, such as Build a Niche Store, which works through the eBay affiliate program, or PopShops, which allows you to build sites based on the datafeeds from various retailers whose programs go through Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, LinkConnector, Red Galoshes and Performics. They have both a free and a paid version, and they handle updating all the information for you. All you have to do is pick the products.

There’s good and bad to these, of course. The bad is that it is harder to customize your pages to make them more unique. The good is that they save you a TON of work in trying to keep your pages updated. Datafeeds can be pretty tedious to customize and update. But customization means that your pages won’t be exactly like the ones on every other affiliates’, and that is a very good thing.

A key thing to remember, no matter what kind of affiliate website you get going is that you cannot just fill it up with affiliate banners and expect to make money. I make very little use of the banners most merchants provide because I prefer to use either datafeeds or posting the links as text in a review or mentioning products in context. A page full of banner ads is not appealing.

I’ve done well with both kinds of sites. I like writing about the products when possible, but it’s pretty hard to keep writing enough. I’ve had a couple of Build a Niche Store sites do really nicely for me as well. My other datafeed sites have done all right, although truthfully I haven’t focused on them too much. But they do well sometimes when someone is searching for the exact item, and my site comes up in the results and gets the sale.

When it comes to designing the site, stick to fairly simple early on or hire someone to do it for you. There are places you can get free templates, places where you can buy individual templates, or places where you can sign up once and download as many as you want.

Another option is Ezy Websites. Their service helps you to learn to create your own templates. While you may not want to learn website design right away, I do recommend that you eventually understand at least the basics. Hiring someone to do it may sound like the easy way, but then you are at the mercy of their schedule for even the smallest of changes. You don’t want that all the time. Knowing something of what you’re doing will help.

Example 2: Blog

Blogging is a great way to start a website. The advantage here is that you don’t have to pay someone to design your site or know too much about doing it yourself… early on. I do recommend knowing the basics in the long run.

I’ve seen two schools of thought on blogging. One is to start right away on paid hosting with Wordpress or similar software. Others say start a throwaway blog on a free host to get a feel for things, then start the real one on paid hosting.

Yes, in the long run, paid hosting is the way to go.

I love using Wordpress because there are so many options available. You can use it as a blog or as a website. I strongly recommend buying Wordpress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin if you’re just starting out with it.

Wordpress is really not all that hard to use. Once you’ve learned how to upload the theme you want and any plugins you want, you’re in good shape. Some plugins will require that you find out where to place a bit of code, but in most cases they tell you the kind of thing you’re looking for, and in which file. Sounds hard, but it’s rarely that bad.

I’m the sort who likes to customize free themes. The theme on this blog was customized from a theme I found that most closely matched the rest of this site. I then worked on it to make them match more completely. But customization can be as basic as changing the header graphic or as complex as reworking much of the CSS and rearranging the different parts of the sidebars. Just depends on what you need.

What can be a real delight about blogging or just using Wordpress is that it creates your pages for you. Once everthing is set up, you just have to type your posts. It can be a huge time saver.

A blog can work for just about any kind of website. Affiliate marketers can use them to post reviews or just generally talk about their products. PopShops even has a free Wordpress plugin. People in direct sales can use them to build their businesses. So can website designers, writers and so forth. The flexibility is much appealling.

Here’s the fun part about blogs - you have the chance to allow people to participate in your website.

You can ask them questions, they can ask you questions. Readers can comment on what you’ve written.

Getting people to participate isn’t as easy as that in most cases, but if you build up a readership it can happen. And you can turn off comments if they just aren’t working out for you.

What About Search Engine Optimization?

SEO can be a tough topic. It’s not something you’re likely to excel at right away. It’s important to a website’s success, but if you focus too long on learning it before you launch your website, you’ll never get anywhere. Join forums such as Digital Point and Search Engine Watch. Consider investing in an ebook such as SEO Book. Read and learn.

Just don’t obsess about it. You will learn the most by doing and making mistakes. You’re not going to learn it all in time to launch your website. There’s a lot of information and it changes quickly.

This is one of the most important lessons you will learn in starting your home business.

Don’t overthink. Action is the only way you will succeed.