Affiliate Datafeeds: An Introduction
Tweet
Some site owners make a few bucks on the side by promoting an affiliate product or two. Many will simply throw an affiliate banner ad into their sidebar and hope it makes a few sales. That’s usually what that approach will accomplish. A few sales – a few commissions – maybe enough for a dinner or two out at a family restaurant that month. Other site owners put more time and effort into promoting affiliate products and usually earn more for those efforts. But for every product you promote this way, you need to spend a fair amount of time dealing with getting the product information onto your site. With just a few products, that’s not a big issue. But what if you want to promote 100 products? Or 1000? Or many more? Do you want to spend all your time typing or copy/pasting product names, descriptions, and prices onto your web pages? You’ve got more important things to do with your site than copy/paste descriptions.
Long ago, the concept of the datafeed was born, and that solved the problem of getting lots of product information onto a site easily, at least for the merchants that offer one (not all do). If you plan to promote more than a few products, then you should get familiar with the process of using affiliate datafeeds.
What are Affiliate Datafeeds?
Affiliate datafeeds are simply text files that contain information about the merchant’s products. Each product listing will typically contain the product’s description, URL, price, image links, and category. Some merchants supply affiliates with datafeeds of all their products, and some only supply a feed of some of their products. In many cases, a merchant’s datafeed may contain information about thousands of products. If you are an affiliate of a merchant that supplies a datafeed, you have a lot of information available for your use, and can save a lot of time and effort in getting that product information onto your site. However, the datafeed text file is useless to you in its pure text form. You need to either have tools available to process and extract all that information, or the programming skills to pull that information out of the datafeed and onto your web site in a meaningful way.
What Does a Datafeed Look Like?
Each merchant may supply a datafeed in a slightly different way than another, and include different types of product information as well, however, the general concept is similar. A typical pipe-delimited datafeed might look something like this:
Product|Description|URL|ImageURL|Price|Category|Manufacturer
(with each product’s info on a separate line in the txt file)
Some will use the “pipe” character shown above to separate each piece of information; others will use other characters such as a TAB or comma. Some will include many pieces of information about a product, while others will only list a few. Each of these differences in datafeed formats makes it difficult to program a one-size-fits-all tool to extract the data from each merchant.
Where Do I Get Affiliate Datafeeds
Some affiliate networks like ShareASale have quite a few merchants who offer datafeeds, while others do not. Some are free; some are not. Some require getting approval for their use, others don’t. The quality of the datafeeds is not always the same either. Some are better than others. One benefit of using the datafeeds from ShareASale is that they allow you to preview the feed to see what it looks like. Look for little “extra touches” like that when searching for datafeeds to use. The possibilities of locating and signing up for a datafeed can sometimes be as jumbled a process as using the data from one, but in the long run, it’s well worth the initial effort.
What If I Only Want To Show Some Of The Products In The Datafeed?
How you use a datafeed is up to you. Some sites will create an entire store filled with products from different datafeeds. Some will only show a few products based upon the site’s specific niche. It’s usually best to either narrow down to a specific subset of products, or expand to include products from multiple merchants, rather than just trying to make a duplicate of one merchant’s store. In many cases, replicating an entire product line is against a merchant’s terms of service anyway, and really, that’s not the best way to serve your users. Why offer them the exact same thing as the merchant? Your users come to your site for your special take on things, so honor that by only showing products that are closely aligned with the reasons they are there.
Won’t Everyone Using Datafeeds Have Duplicate Content?
Yes, maybe…but it doesn’t have to be that way. You definitely don’t want to create a duplicate site of a hundred others. That won’t get you very far. Neither your users nor the search engines will find much value in that. You do need to get creative when using datafeeds, and you really need to provide additional content and value beyond the simple listing of product information if you hope to create a good site that earns money and ranks well in the search engines. There are lots of ways to add value and content, and the more creative you can get with this the better. Strive to be different.
- Write articles or blog posts about a topic, and automatically integrate related products into the post.
- Create comparison tables of similar products, rate and review products, etc.
- Edit the product descriptions within the datafeed itself to make the feed info unique from all the rest.
Make your site unique first, make the feed info unique next, and then utilize the products in the datafeed as enhancements to your site. That will give you and your site credibility and value, and that’s what the search engines and visitors will appreciate.
This Sounds Hard
Well, there is definitely a learning curve involved with the use of datafeeds, I won’t lie. But it still beats hand-coding lots of product information, even with that learning curve. Unfortunately, unless you’re a programmer, you are probably not going to be able to do much with datafeeds on your own. There are just too many variances in each merchant’s feed, and even with the simplest, cleanest feeds, you still need to be able to extract the right data at the right time, and display it in a human-enjoyable format that links to the products displayed. The goal is to make sales – not just dump a bunch of ugly useless text onto a page. So, if it’s so difficult make use of the datafeeds, what options are there? Luckily, lots of smart programmers over the years have created tools that handle most of the formats you’ll find in datafeeds, and will output them in whatever way you choose. So unless you have the skills and patience to re-invent the datafeed extraction wheel, your best bet is to use an already available tool. Of course, just to make things more difficult, deciding which tool to choose can be just as confusing, and again, it often depends upon how you plan to use the feeds, or what kind of site you already have.
If you blog, then you’ll want to read Beyond Awesome: Intelligent Use of Affiliate Datafeeds within WordPress, as it discusses the best tool for you.
On the other hand, if you just have an old-fashioned plain HTML site or plan to create one, then continue reading.
Using WebMerge
One of the oldest and most well-known datafeed tools available to affiliates is WebMerge. WebMerge lets you transform the information in the datafeed into static HTML web pages, creating a new HTML page from the data in each record of the feed, using your own templates. WebMerge is a good choice if you want to create a static HTML site, with one product per page. The general process involves creating templates for category and detail pages, processing the datafeed file, and letting WebMerge create new HTML based upon the templates and data. It’s more labor-intensive in the beginning, setup phases, but becomes less so with time (although it does always involve some manual processing, and is not completely automatic). I strongly recommend carefully reading the help files included with WebMerge to help cut down on the time spent learning how to use it. WebMerge has a free trial, so you can certainly try it out and see if it’s something that would work for your situation.
Are There Other Tools I Can Use?
There are actually quite a few options out there, and I’ll be devoting some time to sharing more about them in future posts. As I noted above, check out Beyond Awesome: Intelligent Use of Affiliate Datafeeds within WordPress for learning about a tool that’s perfect for WordPress fans.
Disclosure: Affiliate links may be used within this post for products I recommend. They in no way affect my judgement of said products, nor do they affect the price of the product.
Tweet
Tags: affiliate networks, datafeeds, similar products
Share and Bookmark This Post
4 Responses to “Affiliate Datafeeds: An Introduction”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
-
[...] Affiliate Datafeeds: An Introduction presented a basic overview of affiliate datafeeds, and how they can be useful in generating additional income for your ebusiness. That post listed one of the most well-known tools for processing datafeeds for static sites, but this post focuses on using a tool that lets you leverage many people’s favorite site tool, WordPress. “Everyone” uses WordPress, so being able to make use of datafeeds within WordPress is outstanding. There are actually several possible tools you could use, but the best that I’m aware of is Datafeedr. [...]
-
[...] Affiliate Datafeeds: An Introduction [...]
An ebusiness coach, web developer, Internet Marketer, SEO, and all around web geek who makes her living from home doing all of the above.
If you feel my blog has contributed to you in any meaningful way, and would like to throw some loose change into a tip jar (metaphorically speaking), a click on the donation button below would definitely be appreciated.
Hi Donna,
I’m very new to affiliate marketing and I haven’t spent much time on it. Most of this info is way over my head, but I know that some of my blogging friends will appreciate it. I added a link to this post on MMOSocialNetwork yesterday. I think many bloggers from the Blog Engage Community will welcome a fresh new blogging voice like yours.
Thanks for the info, I’ll come back to this when I’m up to speed.
Thanks, Ileane! The link is much appreciated. Hope the site can give some value to you and the rest of the community.