Datafeeds Are An Affiliate Marketer’s Secret Weapon

First of all, I guess, the expression “datafeed” is not known to everyone and therefore, I will try to give you a short explanation:

Usually, a datafeed is the whole inventory of a merchant store all written into one .txt file. It has URL’s, product images, categories, prices and descriptions included and the different sections are separated from each other. The links will have a generic affiliate
expression included like aid=XXXXX. And your job as an affiliate is to replace that XXXXX with your affiliate ID.

Some datafeeds are generated with your affiliate ID already included, though. This is dependent on the merchant or the network you’re using.

What datafeed formats are there?

The most common formats are pipe delimited (|), .csv (comma separated values) and tab delimited ( – a big space in between the different areas). In order to make changes to such a file, the best thing would be to open it in MS Excel. Because Excel will be able to use the separators and actually display the content in a neat way, in lines and rows so it will make sense when you’re looking at it.

What software do you need?

There are several tools available on the market which can bring your datafeed to life. In combination with a WordPress blog, you can automate the posting to your website. Of course, you’ll need to use a datafeed which has enough products in it in order to have content for a few days or weeks.

One of these tools is called Affiliate Feed Generator by Michelle Timothy and it’s the one I’m personally using whenever I am putting that kind of sites online. This software will take the raw text file and convert it into a file which you can use in combination with RSS2Blog (having the “break” tags included already). But that’s not all: It will also produce a RSS file for you with an .XML ending.

Meaning, you can upload this XML file to your server, fire up any tool which can post entries from RSS feeds to a blog and you’re set. You’ve just automated a huge part of the content creation and posting process. You still have to add articles and reviews and that kind of content, too, in order not to be seen as a “thin affiliate” (Someone who doesn’t bring any additional value to their product promotions e.g. by just copying and pasting the ads the merchant provides. These ads can then be found on hundreds of websites…).

Why should you care about datafeeds?

Well, it’s one of the easiest way of posting content to your site on a regular basis. Especially if you’re using blogs, the whole process can be automated. If you combine datafeeds with posting regular articles, you will have your income on autopilot.

That’s because every product that gets posted there has the potential to make you money as your affiliate link is always included. Moreover, by posting it in between your real content, it acts as additional content (most of the times, the product descriptions are long enough to count as real content) – thus making your content more “unique” in the eyes of the search engines.

Your content will be seen as unique as soon as you have added at least 25% of different content to your HTML page. In other words, as soon as you’re adding additional material like pictures, videos and additional text and you’re not just posting the same article like everyone else, you will have an advantage in the search engines.

So if you’re using a combination of Article Builder to make e.g. your private label articles unique AND you’re also adding datafeeds to the mix, you can bet that you will have no problems with your content being seen as duplicate content even if you’re using the same articles as everyone else!

Where can you get datafeeds?

You can either get them directly from the merchant you want to affiliate with (you probably have to ask them) or you join an affiliate network like Commission Junction (CJ.com) and Shareasale (Shareasale.com). The difference between these 2 networks is that Commission Junction wants you to pay a fee (around $200) to use their datafeeds while datafeeds on Shareasale are free.

Personally, I love the Shareasale network (as it is very easy to navigate and they are listing all the merchants which are offering datafeeds). So if you want to find merchants with datafeeds, you just go to the section “Find/Join merchants” in your Shareasale admin area. Next, you click on the link “View those with datafeeds”. And last but not least, you click on “Join program” to the right of the merchant’s listing.

Conclusion:

If you want to promote more than just Clickbank products, using datafeeds is a good alternative. Of course, you’ll have to choose merchants which have a high payout on physical goods (a minimum of 5% on high priced goods) so it really is worth your time. Just compare some of the merchants which are in the same categories and you will get a feel for this.

And the additional content perspective should not be neglected, either. In times of everyone screaming “duplicate content”, it can be a good idea to differentiate yourself from others by adding something useful to your pages. Even if these are just product descriptions – but you will gain keyword density and probably get ranked for keywords that you never knew would bring you visitors. Just check your web stats and you
will see what I mean…