An Introduction to Affiliate Datafeeds
This is an article I originally wrote and published back in 2006. I felt it would be quite useful to bring it back out to the front of things again, since I recently released a new version of The Affiliate Datafeed Profit System. This may be the beginning of a series of expert affiliate marketing articles… or a special report. I haven’t quite decided yet but I hope you find this useful
- Kathy
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 like Share A Sale 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.
Originally written & published in 2006 by Kathy Burns-Millyard
Added May 6, 2008…
I’ve had some people ask me how much money can be made with affiliate datafeed websites, and the answer is the same as it always is: It depends.
There are too many variables that can factor into the success or failure of any given website or niche, and it’s these variables that cause one site in a niche to do amazingly well, while another in the exact same niche tanks badly.
I can tell you my personal experience though. Most of my datafeed driven websites made an average of about $100 per month when I had them online. Some of those sites would do $500 for a few months out of each year, then next to nothing the rest of the time though because they were seasonal. I’ve also had sites that barely generated an average of $20 per month, and a couple that averaged several hundred per month.
And this is the norm in my experience for any type of website. You can force a site to succeed by putting enough time and effort into it. Whether it’s actually profitable - or even worth it or not though, depends on your actual return on investment. If you have to work 100 hours a week for a site to earn $1000 each month, that’s not as good a ROI as one which makes the same amount of money for 10 hours work.
I personally have a soft spot for datafeed websites because visitors come to them in a shopping frame of mind. They’re not looking for general information, how to, or knowledge… they want to buy something. And that’s usually what provides the best return for me 
