Affiliate Marketing Blog: Merchant RSS Feeds: A Win-Win Situation

Tuesday, 19 February 2008

Merchant RSS Feeds: A Win-Win Situation

I started a thread on the A4U Forum about a couple of years ago and not many merchants have added their latest products or top products RSS feeds even still.

But the thing is they help us affiliates promote you more. Here's an example. I wouldn't normally go to Savastore to find new products or reference them in my blogs. But because they responsed on the forum with their feeds I added it to my reader and when I searched for new products within it - up they popped with a new mp3 player.

Now this is a perfect way for you merchants to let us know without any additional effort on your part about what new products you have - its all there in an RSS feed. You can also have a feed of your top offers so discount code affiliates etc can keep on top of them.

I don't know why more merchants haven't responded! It's just so much easier for us all to make more sales. The best example I can find is Gareth from UrbanityStore who added a shed load of latest, featured and sale products - if you can aim for that, you're onto a winner.

So if you do have feed, go over to the A4U Forum and add your feeds! Savastore just got a new active affiliate from doing it!

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2 Comments:

At 27 February 2008 at 23:23 , Anonymous said...: Hi Lee, I had a conversation with a few affiliate managers last week about making the feeds better for SEO and making them rank slightly different to the merchants site, helping the affiliates dodge duplicate filters etc. Also about getting merchants to understand what an RSS feed can do for them.
It's good that there's now a shoutbox for the feeds by using the A4U forums. I only use affiliates with feeds when not in the day job.
At 6 March 2008 at 14:28 , GPS said...: Hi Lee,

I run a french property company. We're currently looking into the area of affiliate marketing as a merchant site. It just seems to make great sense. The idea is to allow companies with relevant websites, ideally popular, to create an RSS feed from our site. The feed would include anything from 1 to 10 properties depending on the space available which would be embedded into a page on their site. Click throughs to us from these affiliate sites that lead to a sale pays out a commision to the affiliate.

I'm guesing but I think what we need is a two stage affiliate signup capability on our site that:

In stage one,we request website,email address and
contact info.
Type of site i.e. must be relevant and attract an audience likely to buy french property (e.g. removals, second hand LHD cars, swimming pool manufacturers, foreign exchange brokers etc)
In stage 2,we
review the suitability of the site. If we're happy with the site we email a link to an Options page on on ours.
The Options page allows an new affiliate to customise a feed for his site that would include, for example, the number of properties to display in the feed, present him with a colour palette so that he can match his site branding etc and the relevant HTML code to embed (cut and paste) at the appropriate place in the relevant webpage on his site.
Enquiries are tracked so that we can identify the source.
That's it. But can you or anyone suggest how it is best done ?