Making More Money With Affiliate Feeds
By Matt DeAngelis | Published 04/23/2006 | Online Business |
I love my RSS reader. I have a gazillion website, blog
and news feeds set up in there, and I get the latest information from all of my
favorite sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it with you. And
RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect that rings when there are new feed
entries to read. So wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I also
get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to announce the new feed entries.
As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because of my RSS reader I
was one of the first to cover adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that
will help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was on it first, I
popped up in the first five Google search results for this keyword for a while,
which drove traffic to this site. So watch your RSS reader.
All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as auto update feature for
websites and blogs. The first application was RSS feeds that automagically
update your site with articles in your subject area from a free article site.
The rationale is that this will give you fresh content that search engines will
eat right up. They call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read some
of these articles? There s a wide disparity in quality from one to another, and
I would never allow articles to be put blindly on my web site without my
approval. For crying out loud you spend hours and hours of time getting your
site to a certain level of quality to build a certain level of trust with your
visitors, and then you re going to allow some hack to put his content on your
site without your approval, just so maybe a search engine will come a few extra
times? That s just stupid.
Need more content? Turn off the football game and write some.
Seriously if you want to use articles as supplemental content, hand pick them.
Just like famous Internet marketer Wille Crawford did on his blog when he picked
my article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there). I have at least 20
- 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that I m going to post on the site as soon as
a I get a chance. That s the good news the bad news is I went through 500 or
so articles to get those.
Closer to home, affiliate merchants are starting to get into datafeeds, which
are sort of like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access to
merchant products using text files. The file contains a list of products,
services, special offers, coupons or other information that you can display on
your site. You then upload that information to your server and use some kind of
tool or script to display the different items in that file. There are programs
on CJ, LinkShare and Shareasale that have datafeeds.
While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it with the same jaundiced
eye as the whole article thing it all depends on your niche, the level of
trust you want to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want to
get.
If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate program, you might try a
product feed. If you want to put up an occasional coupon or special offer, you
can probably do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo jumbo.
We are starting to see products that convert merchant datafeeds to RSS, allowing
you to auto-display products from affiiliate programs. Again, if you can
maintain relevance across the entire affiliate line, it s a good idea. If not,
you re not going to get conversion anyway, so you re wasting your time.
Personally I want everything including the advertising, to have relevance to my
visitors.
There s always a shortcut in this case you re shortcutting the time and effort
involved in finding relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some
sites.
If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some resources:
1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I think they're plugging
their own tool.
2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh they also have a tool.
One last thing, while I was out looking for links and information, this is what
someone said about using datafeeds:
Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot and never have to
think about the blog again after I spend a few hours setting it up!
How do you think that blog is doing?
Matt DeAngelis runs http://www.AffiliateBlog.com - Insights on Affiliate Programs and Internet Marketing. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.
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