Experienced affiliate marketers can probably skip this one. This is my basic guide to using product feeds which aimed at entry level affiliates who want to know about the tools available to them.

What Are Product Feeds?

Product feeds, or data feeds, are a great tool for affiliate marketers building websites and wanting to incorporate product information into them.

Many merchants will export their product information into a text based format such as CSV or XML. These are called product feeds or data feeds and are usually available through your affiliate network.

What's In A Product Feed?

These files will usually contain at least the following pieces of information:

• Product Code/ID
• Product Name
• Product Description
• Price
• Image URL
• Affiliate URL

With this information, you can quickly build large sites full of great product data.
Excel is commonly used to open and view CSV files. Excel could traditionally only handle files with 64,000 rows, but the latest version can handle about a million rows, which means you can even work with large product feeds like the one from Play.com which is about 250,000 rows in size.

What Can I Do with A Product Feed?

You can use the data feed file as a data source itself and have your web pages read directly from it, or import it into a database server like MS SQL or mySQL. I have recently started to just use CSVs as data-sources if they are not too big, and only bother importing them into a database server if they are large or will be getting a lot of hits.

I define "large" for this purpose as being about 1000 rows. Anything more than that and you may possibly be putting a performance hit on the server as it reads the text file every-time your web page is requested. If it's for a site I don't expect to get high traffic, I may be more relaxed about using slightly larger CSV files.

As well as creating dynamic pages, you could also use an off-line application to generate static web pages based on the information in a product feed. I started work on an application like that, but have yet got round to finishing it as there are probably better solutions out there.

How Often Do Product Feeds Get Updated?

This varies between merchants and you're best of checking with them. Popular mobile phone merchants may refresh their data feeds many times a day. Other types of merchant may not need to update a file for months. If you are having to update a product feed frequently, you can look at automating the process in a batch file by getting a direct download link from the affiliate network and using a tool like wget

Why use Product Feeds?

Product feeds enable you to quickly build large sites full of product information. This is great for white label style sites or price comparison, or generally just adding affiliate content to your site.

Anything to be careful of when using product feeds?

If all affiliates are using the same product feeds, then there's a risk of too many people duplicating the same content and being penalised by search engines. Be creative in choosing what information to use and balance it with text of your own or even consider functions to replace certain words with alternatives to create web content that is unique - for instance, replacing "great" with "excellent".

Conclusion: Product feeds represent a convenient and accessible way for affiliates to incorporate useful merchant information into their own websites.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, beginners, product feeds