Affiliate Datafeed Program

About the datafeed program - As an internet company we not only host websites but we also run many of our own. We have made tens of thousands of dollars in commissions through affiliate marketing in just a couple of years. Now we have added some of the same programing used on many of our websites as a standard feature on our hosting platform.

Using datafeeds from one of the primary affiliate companies, cj.com, shareasale.com or performics.com you can upload the datafeed and have an instant affiliate store with up to 2000 products. The store can be used in addition to your other items you may offer and can serve as an additional layer of income for your website. Or just run the website solely as an affiliate marketing website as your primary income.

This same program has been run on several of our own websites and has produced as much as $1000.00 in commissions from over $17,000.00 in gross revenue during a single month on a single website. Now this same program is available to everyone hosted on our servers.

Adding the Affiliate datafeed program to your page.

Use the inclusion code %%include-affshop%%

Configuration - The program will not work until you configure the program and upload a datafeed.

The configuration will require you to specify which feed format you are using and how you want the pages to appear. Also, the level of click fraud you want to use. The configuration should be relatively self explanatory, but here are a few key elements to be aware of.

• Specify the datafeed format - Each of the affiliate programs uses its own data format. Fortunately, all of the feeds they provide use the same format. So all you need to know is which company has provided the datafeed for you. If you select the wrong format, everything will be mixed up if it works at all.

• Set the number of items you want to display on each of the index or search results pages. A good number is 10, but you can list up to 50 on each page.

• Using Images - Most merchants will provide an image url, some are smaller than a postage stamp and some are bigger than an average page. If you get one in the middle, you can specify to include the image they provide to be displayed in your actual product page.

• Use categories - If the merchant has provided a reasonable breakdown of categories you can list those categories and they will link to all the items in that category. If there are no specified categories all items will be listed in one MISC category.

• Use Search - You can include a search form at the top of each page giving the visitor the ability to search for specific products, stock numbers or keywords.

• Remove HTML - This allows you to let the program remove any html in the descriptions, names or prices. It is very common for merchants to bury links back to their own website.

• Click fraud filters. The biggest problem with clicking is blocking bots from tripping your clicks and lowering the EPC or earnings per click. Merchants depend on their overall EPC to attract new affiliates. They will remove you i your EPC is too low. Since you have no control over who clicks on an add, you have to at least limit the number of times they can click. The default is 50, but a better number is between 10 and 15. You don't want someone to use your site and get blocked after clicking over a few times, but you don't want a bot to run up 2,000 clicks by crawling every item.

• The next people you want to block is the big guys, you know google, msn yahoo and the rest. Since they will never buy, you don't want them crawling all the way through to the merchants website. The bot blocking will take care of that problem.

All in all, the program is very tight. It employs years of knowledge into search engine optimized text formatting and BOT protection. Years of learning the hard way like getting dumped from programs due to heavy bot activity has tuned this program to a real winner.

We wont give you all the details on how it all works, but you should realize just from the filters, it is more insightful than any other datafeed parsing program available.

Datafeeds are limited to 2MB in total size or 2000 products, which ever is less. The program is not intended to run larger feeds with tens of thousands or millions of products. That requires very different programing and resources that does not fit our $10 pricepoint.

Uploading the Datafeed - Datafeeds must be in plain text format. They should be named something.txt, the something would be the name of the datafeed and in not important as long as it uses the .txt extension. Under the datafeed tools, click on upload a datafeed. Upload the file just like any other file. As soon as you upload a new file, the old data is deleted and the new feed is installed.

Cleaning Datafeeds - As you set the configuration and look at the actual display pages you must keep in mind that no 2 datafeeds are the same. Some are well defined with product categories and some are an absolute mess.

Some feeds do not supply categories or include categories that can't work. Each datafeed is normally cleaned manually before uploading. It is important to remove binary characters and characters that are non-html compatible. Define the categories, remove hidden links and clean up the descriptions using any text editor. If you don't clean up the datafeed, you will see the results in your pages. Of course, some merchants will provide very clean data and it wont require any work on your end.

There is no way to create a program that will work 100% of the time. This one will, however, not all the options will work all the time since they depend on merchant provided data.

For example, if you choose to display images on the item pages, the datafeed must supply the image location. If that field is not in the datafeed, no image will appear. The same will occur with the use categories option. If the category is not defined, it will list everything in one "Miscellaneous" category.

If you are unhappy with the results, just rework your datafeed and upload it again. The new data will replace the old data and give you instant updates.