Rss Feeds - How Affiliates Can Use Them
Many merchants - including PurelyDiamonds publish RSS feeds. These may be of Top Ten products (like purelydiamonds feed://www.purelydiamonds.co.uk/purelydiamond/rss/topten.xml on AffiliateWindow) or blog entries with news of new products.
Some merchant, like amazon now allow you to build specific feeds with the affiliate code embedded (amazon instructions here)but what about the others. How can you use these feeds on your sites?
Many affiliate programs allow you to add a tracking link direct to a URL, some you need to add code at the start (like affiliatewindow), others you need to add the code at the end, and others you need to add code at both the start and end of the URL.
With static pages, not generated by a CMS or blog (like wordpress) you can add feeds using a little PHP, you can dowload MAGPIE RSS here. This is a set of code files that you need to unzip and upload to your website, just follow the instructions.
If you are not so technically minded you might want a script like RSS2HTML you will jsut have to edit the template file so that the affiliate tracking code buts up to the ~~~FeedLink~~~ parameter, either code before:
http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?awinmid=1992&awinaffid=!!!ID!!!&p=~~~FeedLink~~~
or after:
~~~FeedLink~~~&ref=123456
For example.
Making sure that the tracking portion immediatly follows / preceeds the URL code with no spaces.
If you have a wordpress blog my good friend Keith Bond has created a plugin for using RSS in blog posts and pages, you can now add the url tracking and this will automatically populate all links from the feed!
