Beyond Awesome: Intelligent Use of Affiliate Datafeeds within WordPress
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.
Datafeedr lets you build an affilate store by selecting products from nearly 6,000 merchants. You define the product categories you’re interested in, and fill those categories with relevant products. You aren’t limited to using just one datafeed from one merchant. Instead, you can sign up with many merchants, from many different affiliate networks, and meld all their products together into one awesome, unified store.
There are other tools that make this multiple-merchant/multiple-network store possible, but Datafeedr goes a few steps further in making this a well-rounded system.
- Datafeedr integrates with WordPress, so your store will match your blog’s theme.
- You don’t need to be a programmer, or hire one, to make use of datafeeds.
- It supports many affiliate networks including CJ, Pepperjam, Regnow, Linkshare, Shareasale, Clickbank, and many more.
- You can easily embed products right into your blog posts, in addition to having a dedicated section for your store. This way, even when users aren’t viewing your store, they can still be introduced to the products within your blog posts.
One of the most interesting features is the Drip functionality, in which the system can automatically post products to your blog, as posts – and you control how often, and in what manner. This is really powerful, and can be great for filling in gaps in your posting schedule. Imagine this scenario. You post regularly on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You take Fridays off, so you can consistently have a 4-Day Work Week, with long weekends every week. You would love to be able to fill in the gaps and let people know about some of the products that they may be interested in, so you schedule Datafeedr to create a blog post every Friday that details one of the products from your store. Think about that for a minute. Cool, huh?
There are lots more great features, but I’ll just highlight a few of my favorites for you.
- No datafeed access fees
- Keep 100% of your commissions
- Manage your affiliate IDs in one place
- Pick the products you want; pick the merchants you want
- Include up to 100,000 products per store
- Unbranded – No ‘Powered by …’ text or link
- Search engine friendly URL’s
- Dynamic/custom product and category meta descriptions
- Complete customization of every page of your store
- Edit category and product titles and descriptions (great for ensuring unique content)
- Every store page can have HTML embedded anywhere on the page (more unique content)
- Create new pages based on keywords
- Tag products with multiple keywords (ie. featured, holiday special, etc…)
- and on and on and on…
This is the kind of product that I used to wish I could build, but just didn’t have the time it would have taken to create such an amazingly robust, do-it-all-and-more type of system.
The biggest problem with Datafeedr is that it isn’t free, and you know how much I love free. But at $27/month, it is far cheaper than I would have charged if I’d built the system. Most of the affiliate products I refer pay me more than $27 in commission for each one sold. So just one conversion per month is all it takes to cover the cost, and well…frankly…it would be hard to imagine converting less than one per month with all this power under the hood.
For me, this is the perfect combination for a great site. You – using a great tool like WordPress – create an interesting site in your specialty niche. You blog. You interact with users. You supply free information to those users. In addition, you use another great tool like Datafeedr to supplement all the free information you supply your readers with products that you’ve chosen that’s perfectly relevant to your audience, and your niche. Each of those components is key to success. You. Your unique take on things. Your supply of information, free to your users. Your ability to monetize by referring relevant products to people interested in the topic. The tools to allow you to add those products, easily, but still gives you the flexibility to make each one unique, and not just some cookie-cutter thin affiliate site. I’m not sure I could come up with a better system if I programmed it myself.
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.
Tags: affilate store by selecting products, affiliate networks, affiliate products, plugin, WordPress
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An ebusiness coach, web developer, Internet Marketer, SEO, and all around web geek who makes her living from home doing all of the above.
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