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Chapter 8: Mostly For Merchants
Idea 59: Starting An Affiliate Program - Datafeeds
Once you have set up your affiliate program (see Idea 57: Starting An Affiliate Program), the more and better tools that you provide your affiliates, the more sales and traffic that they will be likely to generate.
One increasingly popular tool that many affiliate programs provide is a datafeed, which is basically a computer-readable data-dump of all the products (together with titles, descriptions, etc.) of all the products that affiliates can link to.
- Some affiliate programs, like Amazon.com's provide a whole set of sophisticated programming interfaces that can be accessed in real-time. In case you're wondering, this is how we were able to create our Piranha Feed
 script.
- Other affiliate programs, just provide a downloadable file of all products (often in .CSV file format - create a spreadsheet of your products in Excel, then Save As CSV).
As well as allowing your existing affiliates to produce better results, you might also find that a datafeed allows you to recruit affiliates that you wouldn't otherwise have got - perhaps even some comparison shopping sites (see Idea 64: Froogle And Other Comparison Shopping Sites).
Need more information on implementing your own datafeeds? There is an excellent discussion board about affiliate datafeeds at www.abestweb.com.
Related Resources:
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