How to Use an Affiliate Datafeed (Effectively)

In the world of affiliate marketing, there are a whole lot of tools available. Merchants want you to sell their stuff for them. And even if you (as an affiliate) are unsuccessful, they still benefit due to the inbound links and citations you provide to them.

So, if you’re an affiliate, you need to understand how to properly use the tools provided to you so you can benefit from them as well (and actually rank, and sell stuff). The most important (and common) tool you can find is the datafeed.

A datafeed is usually a CSV file containing the products from a particular merchant. The fields consist of the product name, description, price, link, and maybe a few others. Merchants on affiliate networks such as Shareasale will typically have datafeeds.

Here’s how you should use a datafeed, with SEO in mind…

  • Change the content. As you pull in a datafeed, you should always make some alterations. For one thing, I like to “clean up” the data – because I often find weird mistakes, strange abbreviations, or undesirable formatting. Secondly, I like to replace words and/or phrases with different ones. I do this across the board, just because it will make my data slightly different than what everyone else has.
  • Add to the content. You can get as fancy as you want with this, but the fancier the better. At the very basic level, you can make what’s already there more “wordy” – just another variation on replacing words (as noted above). But the better option is to add totally new additional content. If you can scrape content and add a snippet of info to your product entry, your site will have the datafeed content plus the scraped additional content. One example of this (that I do) is a t-shirt site I own. The products all come from the merchant’s datafeed, but in addition to that data I write an additional few sentences or paragraphs about the shirt. If applicable, I embed a related YouTube video. Get creative and you can probably think of tons of ideas like this, for your datafeed.
  • Re-format the content. Again this is basic, but can only help – especially when compounded with the other changes. If the datafeed uses bullet points, take out that formatting and use CSS or just dashes and linebreaks. If the description comes before the price, put the price after the title but before the description. If there is no “sale” price…add one! Put a strikethrough on it and put it in red. Pull out the first hundred characters of the description and make it into a short description, and re-order the sentences – and use that on your site’s landing page to link to the product. Get the idea?
  • Re-do the images. For images, you should download them (either by actually downloading, or if not possible by caching). You should re-name them with the product name. You should re-create the thumbnails in a different size (even if only slightly different.
  • Do not link to the merchant. (If you can help it.) Mod_redirect is your friend. I have been saying for a while now that learning htaccess is one of the most important things a web developer can learn, and this applies to aff. marketing as well. Maybe more. You can avoid linking to the merchant through various means, and if you can’t do it super-clean via htaccess directives you can do it through other means as well (with your favorite scripting language). The end result needs to simply be that all links and all assets either are being served from your site or they look like they are.

I probably don’t have to say it, but if you have scripting skills and can at least find your way around a server, you’re ahead of the game. To do any of the above manually will take a long time and become tedious quite quickly. I recommend learning PHP, becoming familiar with mod_rewrite, and learning how relational databases work. (A little regex can’t hurt either!)

There are other aspects to using datafeeds, but this list covers the big issues and will get you around most of the SEO issues that plague an affiliate. And surprisingly, most affiliates don’t even implement one of the changes on my list! So if you do what I suggest, you may end up in the top 5% of affiliates – thus giving you an advantage in your site’s optimization and avoiding  having exactly the same content as everyone else (including the merchant).

Datafeeds are a starting point, best used as a basis to build upon. To use them effectively, you must enact the fundamental rule of SEO which is to provide value (by adding it, in this case).