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.

© 2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Kathy has worked online full time since
1997, and the bulk of her income is generated using affiliate datafeeds. Her
web-based software: <A HREF="http://www.gurugazette.com/WPAPS/">The
Affiliate Datafeed Profit System</A> (http://www.gurugazette.com/WPAPS/),
helps almost anyone create a fully automated affiliate datafeed product site
using standard WordPress blog software and The Share a Sale network.