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.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: affilate store by selecting products, affiliate networks, affiliate products, plugin, WordPress
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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.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: affiliate networks, datafeeds, similar products
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The following is a list of 10 ways to make money online, but this also includes a quick glossary of terms used when speaking about online income generation. A list of ways to make money online is useless if the terms and acronyms used have no meaning.

CPA
CPA stands for Cost Per Action. CPA programs include affiliate and referral programs which pay a commission based on specific actions taken by a user.

Examples:

• You refer a user to a company. That user purchases a product from the company. That action (the purchase of the product) earns you a commission.
• You refer a user to another company. That company is hoping to get users to fill out a form, giving them information such as name, email address, etc. When the user completes the action of filling out the form, you earn a commission based upon that action.

I’ve already discussed affiliate programs in depth here, but some quick examples of affiliate networks are LinkShare and Commission Junction.

CPC
CPC stands for Cost Per Click. Typically, these are programs such as Google’s Adwords / Adsense, where an advertiser pays only for ads that experience a click-thru. You, as the publisher, show these ads on your site, and each time a visitor clicks on the advertiser’s ad, you earn a small commission. (Adwords is the advertiser’s program and Adsense is the publisher’s program. You would be using Adsense, since you would be the publisher).

CPM
CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand, and refers to cost per 1,000 impressions, such as $25 for every 1000 ad views. (The M in CPM is Latin for “one-thousand.”) Advertisers are billed based on the number of times an ad is seen by visitors, regardless of the visitor’s subsequent action. This is the typical pricing method for banner ads and is usually limited to high-traffic sites. If your site has enough traffic, then you can apply to ad networks such as FastClick, Burst, TribalFusion, or Casale. The obvious advantage of using these banner ad CPM networks is that users are not required to take any kind of action (either clicking an ad or purchasing a product). Just the mere act of seeing an ad means you get paid. This, however, is limited to sites that receive a lot of traffic, so it is not available to the majority of people.

Direct Sponsorship
One of the best ways to generate income is to directly sell ad space on your site. If your site has a strong user base, or generates enough traffic, you should be able to get people to place ads on your site for an amount that is considerably higher than if you sold ad space through a network, ad broker or third party. This does take considerable time and effort however, so many people opt to use third parties as well, such as Adbrite and Text Link Ads. These types of brokers will take a cut of the profits, so you will earn less, but you’ll reach a larger amount of potential advertisers.

Sell Your Own Products
Obviously you can sell your own products, which can include digital goods such as e-books. Digital goods are fairly easy to produce, have little to no cost to you, and are delivered electronically to the buyers, so shipping problems or costs are not an issue. E-books can be created using a free word processing program such as OpenOffice and then saved in PDF format. Sell the e-book using PayPal to process payments and you’re in business.

Subscriptions for Premium Content
I generally don’t recommend this, especially for newbies, but it needs to be listed as a consideration. Some sites charge a fee for access to premium content. This is a subscription-based model, and only works when you have high-quality premium content to offer. People these days expect online content to be free, so if you want to charge for content, it will have to be outstandingly excellent.

Paid reviews
Bloggers will sometimes review products or sites for a fee, using services such as ReviewMe as a third-party broker to find advertisers wishing to have their products or sites reviewed. It can be a controversial method of income, since a lot of people think that paid reviews are not objective. I disagree with that, however you will need to have earned the trust of your readers if you want to do paid reviews. Your readers will want to know that you can be paid and still be objective, and only your previous posts will have earned that trust.

Paid Blogging
Many bloggers post on sites that are not their own, or they post within blog networks. These posts are often paid positions. You can find people who are looking to hire bloggers at places such as Problogger’s job board.

Get Paid To
“Get-Paid-To” services, such as Cash Crate, allow you to earn money by simply filling out surveys, accepting coupon offers, etc. This type of thing is mainly for someone who either wants to earn some side money, or who doesn’t have a site of their own. It is not easy to make a significant amount of money this way, but if you have the patience to fill out form after form after form, you can earn a decent amount of extra money.

Domaining / Flipping Sites
Domainers and site flippers often purchase domain names and/or sites with the intention of quickly turning around and selling them again for a profit. You can purchase domains at places such as Godaddy or in high-volume at Moniker and then turn around and sell them at places like Digitalpoint and Sitepoint.

Work Online and Make Money

Bonus tip: You can freelance and hire yourself out to others, doing jobs such as writing, editing, programming etc. Check out sites like elance.com to get an idea of the vast array of possibilities that exist for freelancers.

*

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ad broker, ad space on your site, affiliate networks, blog networks, broker, CPA, CPA CPA, e-book, e-books, free word processing program, Google, Online Income, online income generation, to ad networks
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There are many ways to monetize an informational web site or blog, and each site owner has to determine the best methods for her own site. And as I’ve mentioned before, since Diversity is a key, you will usually want to have several methods of monetization working for you at all times. Today, we’ll touch on earning commissions from affiliate sales. I’ve earned quite a bit of money from affiliate sales over the years, and along the way I’ve learned a thing or two about it.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

First, let’s make sure everyone understands what affiliate sales is all about. Let’s say you know lots about kites, but you don’t actually sell kites or anything related to kites. You’ve set up a blog where you can teach the rest of us everything we might need to know about kites and kite-flying. You can join a kite store’s affiliate program which allows you to refer your readers to their online kite store. If any of your readers purchase anything from their store, you earn a commission because you referred the customer to the company. So, you see, you don’t have to sell your own products. You can simply make commissions when your readers purchase a product you’ve recommended.

When you join a company’s affiliate program, you’ll be given special code to use that will create either links or banner ads. You place the code on your blog (either in a blog post or in the sidebar). When one of your readers clicks the link or banner ad, they are taken to the company’s site. At that point, the company knows that the reader came from your site, and any purchase that reader makes will earn you a commission. (Some affiliate programs pay based on actions other than sales, such as leads, but affiliate sales is what I’m most familiar with).

As in all monetization methods, you’ll need to test things and determine what works best for you. However, in general, I’d say that actually reviewing products and using the text-only affiliate link within the review itself is often the best way to market affiliate products. Banner ads are fine, but actual text links within reviews nearly always work better for me. This way, the reader knows that you’ve tested the product and your recommendation is more likely to cause them to purchase the product.

If you need to find products that relate to your niche, or companies in your niche that offer affiliate programs, you can simply search for “your niche keywords affiliate” in your favorite search engines. That’s a great way to find some independent affiliate programs that may not be known by everyone. I always start with this type of search first. Once I’ve exhausted all possible affiliate programs this way, I then move on to the affiliate networks to see what they have to offer in my niche.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of affiliate networks, but I’ve only dealt with a few of them. I’ll list the ones I’ve used below. These are the ones most people have heard of, and they are at least reliable in that they make payments and they’ve been around for some time. I don’t make any guarantees about them, of course, but I’ve personally never had a problem with any of them. I usually use at least 2 or 3 networks for each site.

Naturally, Commission Junction is first on the list, as they are the “biggies” of the group. They have thousands of programs offering tons of products, with many of them being major brands. I always check here to see what programs fit my niche.

Next up is LinkShare.com Similar in scope to cj.com, they are large and have lots of programs and products, including major brands.

I also like Shareasale because although they have lots of programs and products, most of them are from smaller, more unique companies and there may be less competition for these products.

Delving into the even more unique niches is the Niche Retail Partner Program which is much smaller, but caters to some nice unique niches such as baby strollers, watches, etc. If your niche fits with these programs, it’s a great fit. Mommy bloggers especially should check it out.

If your niche lends itself well to software products, then OneNetworkDirect is worth joining.

And along those same lines, but on a broader scale, ClickBank is the place to go for all kinds of digital products (ebooks, software, etc.)

Finally, I’d check out AffilateBot. I haven’t used them yet, but I’ve been hearing good things about them, so they may be worth looking into.

You might also want to subscribe to Revenue Magazine (ad shown below). The affiliate articles are interesting and informative, but the ads are as well. The ads are a great way to find new affiliate programs that might be perfect for your niche site.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: affiliate networks, affiliate products, ClickBank, digital products, favorite search engines, informational web site, niche site, online kite store, Revenue Magazine, search first, site owner
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.