Using Affiliate Data Feeds

Many career affiliates use data feeds to add product pages or links to their sites. Data feeds are database files that contain information about all of a merchant's products, usually including the product name, description, image, price and your affiliate link. Some data feeds also contain other information.

Some merchants make their data feeds available to every affiliate. Others charge a fee for providing them. And some only provide data feeds to their top performing affiliates. Affiliate networks sometimes make all of their feeds available to approved affiliates for a one-time fee.

In order to use a data feed, you'll need a program that can export databases into HTML. Alternatively, you could get a programmer to translate the files into web pages. Either way, data feeds enable you to add any number of products to your website quickly and easily. And by using the latest data feed from a merchant, you can ensure that you list all products that are currently available and none that are not.

There are a couple of different ways in which you can use data feeds. One is to create an online store-type site. You can separate products into categories, and display links to descriptions of individual products on the category pages. You can also add specific types of products to pages with content related to those products. For example, if you have an article about running shoes on your site and you are an affiliate for a shoe company, you could display links to various styles of running shoes on that page.

Data feeds make it easy to set up an affiliate store, or to add links to an existing affiliate site. You can even set it up so that your site is updated automatically if the merchant makes its feeds available on a server. Just remember that the best performing sites include more than just a bunch of affiliate links. Adding some original content will make your site more attractive to the search engines and to visitors.