The biggest headache with affiliate datafeeds is that every merchant has a different format. Which has spawned an entire industry of various service providers that do nothing but transpose the datafeeds into a common format that makes it easier for an Affiliate Marketer to import.
But, paying big money just to have datafeeds isn’t economically smart for localized niche (i.e less than 125) product websites. And finding the right plugins to import data isn’t a joy either. Now, I’m not saying that PopShops, GoldenCan, etc. are bad. They’re actually quite good. But when your building five affiliate sites with less than 125 products it may be better to save the money, time, etc. and do it yourself.
RSS to the rescue! The one common plugin available for Wordpress, Joomla, osCommerce, etc. is the ability to import data via RSS. And RSS is very good at importing datafeeds of 125 items or less. So it only makes sense that if you had a tool that would convert merchant datafeeds to RSS you could do alot more marketing with alot less work.
And since there’s an Open Source project for nearly every task, I went looking… And I found Affiliate Datafeeds. This little jewel is a very open, barebones (read flexible) set of PHP script that converts CSV and XML datafeeds into RSS feeds, uses RSS Category fields for mapping, and will even let you define extra (non-rss) fields for mapping the data into your CMS.
They provide a Joomla component too. And for Wordpress you can use wp-o-matic or any other number of plugins to read the feeds in. I’ve tested it with Joomla, Wordpress, and have additionally fed Squidoo, WetPaint, and yes FaceBook and MySpace with it too. Pretty much if the site can read RSS, you can automate it. And it doesn’t take alot of skill either. Just a little patience and knowing what products you want to promote.
All you need is a webserver with PHP. You do have a server in your home office, don’t you? Go read about it HERE. But if you don’t it’s okay. As long as you have a hosting account with PHP available your good to go. You can even push it to FeedBurner. So no excuses, you can do this.
You can Download Affiliate Datafeeds HERE.
You can visit the Webpage of Affiliate Datafeeds HERE.
You can see real sites using Affiliate Datafeeds HERE.
Start discussion.....