Affiliate Marketing Using Data Feeds

Many companies that run an affiliate program are providing product data feeds to their affiliate publishers. These data feeds get products listed in search engines, shopping comparison engines and on affiliate web sites. A great example of an affiliate program that provides a data feed is the CreditCards.com Partnership Program. They provide completely customized credit card offer content through an XML data feed.

As an affiliate publisher, you can depend on these feeds to keep your site fresh with the newest and hottest products and prices. It is true that you may need to learn a little about data feed manipulation in order to actually use a data feed, but the time spent learning is time well spent.

Most feeds are provided as a .csv, .txt, .xml or .sql formatted file. You can import the data into your own database and generate dynamic fresh product pages. Design a basic product page template in your favorite language ( PHP, ASP, Perl, etc…) and make sure you add all the necessary SEO page optimization techniques I explained in my Affiliate Marketing Page Optimization lesson. It is crucial that your pages load fast and have some unique content on them besides the information that is provided in the data feed.

A good rule of thumb when adding data feed product pages to your site is to only add a few categories of products at a time. By slowly adding 50-75 pages a month, you will most likely not get "DINGED" by the search engine bots as an affiliate marketing spammer.