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Affiliate programs have evolved over the years. From just placing text links or banners on your web site or in your newsletter, to the ability to link to individual products for sale.
One of the latest advancments in affiliate marketing are datafeeds. Datafeeds allow you to incorporate a merchants complete (or any part) product catalog into your own site.
I just started messing around with merchant datafeeds and I have 2 sites, lingerie-review.com and 4fun-sextoys.com, that I use merchant datafeeds on. This is a brief article on how I use these datafeeds to promote the merchants products within my sites.
Like I said I have just started experimenting with using and promoting programs and products using datafeeds and this is just the way I am handling the feeds.
The Data
Datafeeds are available in a variety of formats, the feeds I am using are both provided in a comma seperated (CSV) text file format.
Weekly I download these feeds from the merchants. I do this manually, just because I am new to this and I want to be able to check out the feed for any errors. I download them and save them to my machine. I usually open the feeds and browse through them to make sure that the data looks like it is intact and to make sure that the merchant has not made any changes to the format of the feed.
The datafeeds that I receive from theses merchants both contain basically the same product information; Product Number, Product Name, Product Link, Description, Price, Thumbnail Image, Full Size Image, Product Category, etc (There are a few other fields, but these are pretty much the only ones I use).
Once I am happy with the integrity of the data I dump the data into a mySQL database that I have set up. The database contains one table for each feed. To import the data into my database I use a mySQL database administration utility, phpMyAdmin, this utility is a MUST for anyone maintaining data in a mySQL database. When importing the data I set the Product Number as a primary key in the table and I over right any duplicates.
Displaying the Products
Once the datafeeds are imported into your database the possibilities of what you do with the data are endless. Your visitors can search through the products and view the products without ever leaving your web site.
To display the products on my site I wrote a little PHP script that pulls the product information from the mysql database based on the product category and then displays the information about the product (name, description, thumbnail, and price) to the visitor along with the links provided by the merchant for more info on the product, or to add the product to the shopping cart.
Helping the Spiders
To help search engine spiders index these sites I set up a .htaccess file. Using the Apache webserver Rewrite module I rewrite a simple URL ending in .html to access the php script and pass the category and page informtion.
A couple of examples of this are:
• http://www.4fun-sextoys.com/html/sex-box-kits-0.html gets rewritten to http://www.4fun-sextoys.com/html/product.php?Cat=kits%20variety-in-one-box&Dis=0.
Here is what the above looks like in my .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^sex-box-kits-([0-9]*).html product.php?Cat=kits\%20variety-in-one-box&Dis=$1
Some Great Resources
- Dev Shed
Lots of resources and tutorials on MySQL, PHP, Perl, and more. GREAT SITE!
- phpMyAdmin
Very useful web-based tool for mySQL database administration.
- PHP.net
Hersey Cartwright
VAFind.com :: Web Design, Affiliate Marketing, Motorcycles, Travel, and more..
Virginia Biker Network :: Motorcycle News and Information
Check out my other sites...
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