Affiliate Marketing Using Datafeeds, Part 1

Article Marketing

Datafeeds are a huge time saver for your affiliate marketing business. To promote products from affiliate merchants, you need to display enough information about each product to entice your visitors to click to the merchant and make a purchase. This information includes the manufacturer, model, price and a photo of each product you list. Affiliate datafeeds allow you to include this information without having to copy and paste for each individual product.

Most datafeeds are fully automated. Depending upon your affiliate merchants, you may encounter three possible formats -- automated with javascript, automated with an RSS feed, or a manual feed...

The javascript format requires you to add some javascript code to your page for each product you want to sell. The code displays a product image and all supporting information, which is updated whenever the merchant makes changes.

This also allows the merchant to drop a product and replace it with another, which may or may not be relevant to your content.

A second automated format is RSS feeds. Some merchants provide a regularly updated RSS feed, which you customize and add to your site using FeedBurner's BuzzBoost feature.

You may also find the occasional "manual" datafeed -- a text file that you download. These files require a database, which most small e-business owners won't have. If you really want to use that merchant's data file, consider asking them to upgrade to a feed that uses javascript or RSS.

Keep It Real

While datafeeds are great for providing your visitors with a range of products, they can't help you get the traffic you need.

One affiliate marketing and datafeeds expert says that for a site to be successful using a datafeed, there should be two pages of relevant and unique content for every page of products. Articles obtained from distribution sites don't count towards this 2-to-1 ratio of content pages to product pages.

Some affiliate merchants won't even allow you to have a standalone datafeed site without content, as these sites have little hope of ranking well in the Search Engines and thus receiving the traffic needed to make sales.

Another risk of a product site is being accused of being a thin affiliate site by the Search Engines. A "thin affiliate" simply takes what the merchant provides with little more in the way of added value for the visitor.

To avoid this risk, give your visitors ways to participate in your site. Add a forum, or a way for them to generate content (SBI! 2.0 for example, allows your visitors to build web pages, complete with text, images or a video).

And find great inbound links to your site. As you become more of an authority in your niche, those links will come naturally. Each one adds to the credibility of your affiliate marketing business, making it more likely that the Search Engines will rank your pages well.