What is an Affiliate Datafeed?

Once you’ve been working with affiliate programs for a little while, you may come across a term that’s new to you: Datafeeds. Many affiliates have heard of them, but they either don’t know what they are or they don’t know how to use them. So let’s look at the basics.

Affiliate datafeeds are simply product databases. Actually, they look a lot like spreadsheets. In fact, they can be imported to general spreadsheet programs for easier editing, sorting and manipulation.

Affiliate datafeeds are not the same as an RSS feed, and this is a common mistake many affiliates and webmasters make. RSS feeds are snippets of news and articles, but datafeeds are pure products. Affiliate datafeeds usually contain physical products such as cell phone batteries, lamps, or other everyday items people buy from stores. There are thousands of datafeeds available online, but they’re not always easy to get or easy to use.

In some affiliate networks for instance, you have to actually pay to access the merchant datafeeds… unless you’re a super affiliate who earns $10,000 or more in commissions every month. In other networks they’re completely free to use, as long as the merchant grants you access to them. Whether you pay to access datafeeds or not though, you’re on your own when it comes to using them on your website.

Since a datafeed is raw data, it contains hundreds or thousands of lines of product information that is not web-ready. The affiliate has to organize, manipulate and display that data themselves. There are a few software programs that can help automate a lot of this though, and depending upon which one you choose, you may find yourself with more or less work to do.

Using affiliate datafeeds is an advanced affiliate marketing tactic that is not for the weak at heart. But the payoff is… you can make a heck of a lot more money with them.

Affiliate marketers who build websites with datafeeds end up with a large, e-commerce style shopping website. The site may have tens of thousands of products on it, or it may have just a few hundred. Because you’re promoting actual products that people are specifically looking for though, you tend to make many more sales over time. This is especially true if you have a lot of targeted traffic visiting your site. Instead of people coming to look for information, how to guides and general articles, they’re specifically looking for a product to buy. Thus when they find it on your site, they click through to the merchant and buy… leaving you with the commissions.

So, once the initial work is done and you start generating traffic, an affiliate datafeed website can be quite profitable for a long time to come.

Source by Kathy Burns-Millyard

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