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!

February 6th, 2009 Posted by admin | datafeeds | no comments

New affiliate tool in development.

Scifind Ltd and Keith Bond are currently developing an affiliate tool. Should be a fantastic device for monetizing domains , existing sites and using as landing sites for PPC campaigns.

This simple little script will produce an online store from a product feed in 10 minutes. Utilising SE friendly urls, caching and is extreamly easy to drop into any existing website template or site design.

Currently we are finishing the search function which is not present on the following examples.

SITE EXAMPLES:

www.mensdesignerunderwear.co.uk

www.nexdayflowers.co.uk

http://fishing.changewebsites.co.uk

We have just started the first round of external testing and we should be able to build on feedback soon.

We would like to hear from affiliates with any ideas of how we can improve this script.

We will keep you posted on progress.

April 8th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized, affiliate marketing, affiliate, SEO, beta test, product feeds, datafeeds | 3 comments

What The F*** Do I Want A Product Feed For?

Product Feeds / Data Feeds

What ever you want to call them.

Historically product feeds are poorly formatted / infrequently updated / have incorrect information / have poor or no category structure. Wait - no that is actually still the case

These are now an increasingly important part of any affiliate program, from both the perspective of the affiliate and the merchant. Product feeds benefit both affiliate and merchant - for the same reasons as remember the affiliate only gets paid when sales are generated for the merchant.

Datafeeds help the affilliate in the following ways:

• Contextual advertising. The affiliate can take keywords from their article and use them to query their product database (built from one or more datafeeds)  and use this to display products relevent to the article.
• Inclusion of merchants products in a site search.
• Price Comparison Applications. Still very popular with affiliates. This speeks for itself really.
• Store Fronts. Datafeeds are still used to produce mini webstores / minisites for portals. This is not a bad thing from the merchants point of view as the affiliate is not so much competing with you (with your content) but competing against your competitiors (and their affiliates) for that ever so crucial listing in the search engines. Often affiliates have a very good understanding of SEO and to allow affiliate to operate their own store front of the merchants store is alot cheeper and more accountable way of promoting products through natural listings.
• Novel ‘Mashups’. It is harder to talk about these - but with the availability of data an affiliate with a little inspiration can make sticky web applications that include affiliate links to products that the visitor is actually interested.

In short affiliates can be lazy and love to be spoonfed information. But when they can throw that information into a web application and send you 100s of sales a month - why worry. For the 10 minute job of a data export from shopping cart software a merchant can have loads to gain and very little to lose.

Advice for Merchants re Datafeeds:

Get it right. Look at your network’s recommendation for product feeds structure and encoding.

The MINIMUM fields that you will be expected to provide are:

Product Name, Product Price, Product URL, Product Image, Product Description, Product Category.

Regarding the product description - you may possibly want to use an alternative description of the product than the one that is used on your site.  This is because search engines can give penaltys to sites that display content that is duplicated across the web

March 8th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized, affiliate marketing, product feeds, datafeeds | 5 comments