More than a few people have asked me how I reprocessed the offer datafeeds to automatically update the products offered in the network of local niche websites for the “ Building an Affiliate Marketing Powerhouse (part one)” posts I did a while back.  Good question.  And here’s a good (well, how I did it anyway) answer.

RSS!

That’s right.  I brought in the datafeeds for the various programs and “normalized” them by using OpenOffice Calc (Excel can do this too, and Access, and Gnumeric).  I just wrote a macro and once a week I pull down the datafeeds from the 6 programs I used and essentially built my own RSS feed.  It wasn’t that hard.  And there are other tools that can do this too.

But basically, I brought in the feeds, normalized them, dumped them into a single CMS on my own internal server (remember Its Time You Had An Affiliate Marketing Server ) and used it’s RSS output to feed the 50 local targeted niche affiliate sites I built.  Sounds easy…  And it was.  But I had help!

The first bit of help was that all my merchant datafeeds were in CSV format.  Plain ASCII text with defined fields.  That made building the spreadsheet macros a cinch.  And the second bit of help was being able to import that normalized data straight into my own local server into the CMS I use most often.  That way I can build a single webpage that is nothing but the feed data that the CMS can spit out as RSS.

And the third bit of help was a program that lets me update CMS systems with RSS feeds.  That’s right…  I’m creating all the pages and content with a CMS (Wordpress works well BTW) with a nice additional iece of software call RSS 2 CMS.  As it states on the website…

“As the name suggests it is a system that converts RSS Feeds into the content of a CMS system. In other words CMS content syndication through RSS. It is built in such a flexible way that it doesn’t matter which CMS system it connects to. Settings inside this free open source script let you define how you access the data base.”

So once a week (this morning in 10 minutes actually) I brought down the latest datafeeds, let my spreadsheet macro normalize the data (make it all the same), imported it to my local server, and ran RSS 2 CMS and within seconds all the products are updated on all 50 sites.  Not too bad….