AssociatePrograms.com

coffee · **Joined**: 10 Oct 2003 **Posts**: 24

Hi,

Has anyone tried to create an affiliate site using a merchant's data feed?
Using a program like webmerge or smart money generator, you'll be able to create a virtual e-shop with your affiliate ID enbedded in each single product code. All you have to do is to change template design, add your original contents to give a custom look.

I'm working on it now using SMG and using a merchant's data feed, it just created 1700 static pages with product pictures,my affiliate ID in just 10 secs!

I wonder if there is anyone out there has done that and if so I'd like to know how he's/she's doing with his business.

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reikiman · Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2005 9:06 pm Post subject:

I've done quite a bit with this - I suppose I ought to write some of my experiences up on my web site.

One of the most interesting things is that people land directly on the product pages from the search engines. In retrospect this is obvious - when I build a page from a datafeed, that page includes lots of good keywords, page titles, and other things required to rank well.

Right now I'm running a little experiment at
http://gadgets.7gen.com/index.php

The site is made soley of products from datafeeds I get from Share A Sale. [Affiliate link deleted. Admin.] Some of their merchants offer datafeeds as a CSV file, and since I'm a competent software engineer I can throw the CSV file into a database and build product pages out of it. For the gadgets site I've gotten that down to where it takes around 30 minutes to get a new datafeed, and build some pages out of it.

I haven't tried to count the number of "pages" I'm displaying, but that site is built from 34 PHP scripts, each of which turns into hundreds or thousands of pages depending on how I've mapped the products onto pages for each merchant. In some cases each product has its own page, and in other cases I list several products per page.

Part of the experiment is to make very few links to the site and see how the traffic builds. Interestingly that's already at 200-300 visitors per day after about 1/2 month of running the site.

Another thing I've done is write some JSP code that uses the Amazon Web Services to download and format product information. You can see an example here:
http://web-building.7gen.com/basic/html-resources.html

Click on the product links, and you'll be taken to a product description page. Notice that there is a "Similar Items" link, and elsewhere a list of similar products. Clicking on each of those does a search through Amazon's web services, formats the data, and displays it on the screen. Thus, by directly recommending one product I can tap on Amazon's database to recommend a whole slew of other related products.

Plus, I've organized those pages so that when someone lands on Amazon's web site the URL they use to get there is the one that pays the highest commission.

Then there's a side benefit for books - There are several book merchants that use a URL format that includes the ISBN number, and Amazons ASIN number is (for books) the ISBN. This means that for a book I can list links to each of these other book merchants simply by formulating URL's for each. And, I do get a small amount of sales through the other merchants. Not that the amazon sales are great shakes either.
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