Datafeed sites can be a great addition to your Affiliate Marketing Income. In many of my past posts I’ve mentioned my desire to break into some solid organic income towards my affiliate business and I firmly believe Datafeed sites can do just that.
What is a Datafeed?
A Datafeed, in the affiliate marketing world, from what I’ve read and understood so far, is usually a big excel spreadsheet consisting of every available products and important information about them for a particular merchant. A merchant is basically just an online shop. These datafeeds help affiliates like us easily build out websites containing content from these merchants.
How do You Make Datafeed sites?
This deserves a post of it’s own and I’ll be doing just that in the near future but for now I’ll keep it brief.
You can make datafeed sites fairly easy these days with the help of datafeed site builders such as Datafeedr. If you’re lazy like me and like things being automated then datafeedr is perfect. Datafeedr allows you to search through 1000s of merchants from 100s of different networks around the world and find the set of products you need to create for your store.
Once you’ve selected your items, which takes about 10-20 minutes, all you do is basically port them over to your website via the datafeedr plug in and bam you’re done! Of course there’s little things you need to tweak and fix up for each store to make them look different to each other like the header image etc but for the most part that’s it. It takes me 45-60 minutes to make one of these using these tools. I don’t want to know how long it would have taken me to do this manually lol.
Some Examples of a Datafeed Site
Much of my affiliate marketing efforts this month has consisted of learning how to use datafeedr, an affiliate datafeed site creating software, and building some datafeed sites. I’ve so far made 5! Check them out below,
www.superhero-cufflinks.com
www.worldmapglobe.com
www.uniquemenswallets.com
www.qualitymetalbeds.com
www.acousticguitarsaustralia.com.au
Pretty cool huh?
It looked hard at first but once you learn the software and a simple yet efficient process, you can crank these out per hour! No joke.
You’ll probably notice that much of the setup for each of these sites are exactly the same, the only thing that changes is really just the type of products. I’ve kept things simple so I can make lots of these really quickly and follow a simple template/process.
How to Make Money with Datafeed Sites
So what’s the idea with these?
Each site that I create has 100s of products within them, each with their own post. The idea is to get as many of these sites out there, creating 1000’s of posts of products in search engines who I’m hoping will pick some of posts up and they’ll start ranking.
If you can get even a small percentage of these to rank and get traffic, you should be able to start seeing a steady income. Once a certain datafeed site starts to bring in traffic/income, I’m going to start focusing more SEO effort on it so it can start to solidify it’s Search Engine Position.
There’s a bunch of ideas I want to test with monetizing these sites but the main idea is to get visitors to click through to one of the products which will take them to the merchants page where they can check out and earn you a nice little commission!
You’re basically creating a middle store between people that want to find a particular product and the site where they can buy it from.
I like the idea of selling physical products because you can make multiple commissions on multiple days due to the long cookie duration’s. Often, I’d refer someone to a merchant site where they’ll make a purchase on the day of the referral but then make another purchase 2-3 weeks later, giving me another commission. Now imagine that happening for 100s of products 😀
I’ve just started building these, and it’s going to take a while to start seeing some traffic so there’s not much I can comment on besides the building process. Hopefully in the up-coming monthly reports I will have some good info on the results.
I’m yet to split test a few things like button colors, button text, products etc but will do so once I start seeing results.
Datafeed Challenge at AffPlayBook
AffPlayBook has recently started a ‘100 Datafeed Challenge’ where participating forum members can join in and make a follow along thread reporting on their journey towards building 100 datafeed sites. This is GREAT for those that want to get serious on this type of affiliate marketing strategy. I started a thread just before the challenge started and asked a tonne of questions. There’s a lot of little hints and tips the more experienced guys drop in the forum but you’ll have to join the forum to go through them all.
Actually, now’s the perfect time to as David’s dropped the price to $67/month, (Take $10 off that if you join through here!)
That’s all I have on Datafeed sites for now, more to come in the near future!
~ Mateen
Hi Mateen, this looks great and something i’ve been looking at again, I used to make a lot of money on affiliate sites back before google penguin and panda arrived to destroy affiliate sites and I lost a $120,000 a year income overnight! I’m wondering if these sites could be advertised through Facebook depending on the type of store.
Wow 120k/a is a big loss! I’m hoping to advertise products that are performing well on facebook column ads once I get a hint of what sells and learn a bit more about the demographic.
Hey! Great post. Im currently using wp all import for creating datafeed websites. But with every import are the product images being stored on the server (goodthing), the disadvantage of this is that the load time of the website is decreasing when there are more product imported. Per website i import usually 10k products. How is this with Datafeedr?
What kind of hosting do u use? Your datafeed websites are loading pretty fast!
Do you really think it is possible to make that money (1k a day) with datafeeds? In my best month i think i did like 2500 USD (per month), but the problem with datafeed sites is keeping your shop ranked… The pattern is usually like this: ranking for 4 weeks (longtails) and then losing your rankings and your website is slowly disappearing…
Whos server do the image get stored on? Datafeedr gives you the option of storing these images on your own server, (locally), or loading them from the merchant site. I have a VPS with BeyondHosting and I host all my images there hence the quick load times.
I’m hoping for something around the $400 mark, realistically, but once I’ve made 100s and have a good amount of good performers, I AM hoping for those kind of results. Mind you, I’ve never done this before, so it’s all just guesstimates for now.
I thought the temporary ranking would be a problem. I’ve got some ideas in mind to try prevent that but will have to implement and see when the time comes. How many did you make and was it just one datafeed making you that much?
Storing the images on your server is better, bc you can reduce the footprints you are leaving. One way or the another, google likes to think that our websites are spammy sites……
Care to share your ideas to preventing the ranking drop?
It where like 50 sites. On average 1 datafeed site generated like 25 USD per month…. but here is also the 80/20 rule applies
I’d like to run some paid traffic to it and promote social sharing somehow, (beyond the usual social sharing buttons at the bottom of each post). Social sharing, (organic), is pretty powerful if you can keep it consistent. I’m not sure how I’m going to do this as of yet though. In order to keep your datafeeds ranked for a good amount of time, I’m sure you need to make it something more then just a store. Maybe add a blog or forum section or something? These are just a few ideas, no idea if they’ll work but there’s going to be a lot of trial and error when the time comes.
Hi Mateen,
I just looked through your sites and they seem to have a really bad onpage optimization. Nothing is unique neither descriptions nor titles is there a way to change this within datafeedr? Google has made it extremely difficult to rank sites like this with no real value for the user.
I dont think your 100 feed sites project is going to be very succesfull if the sites stay like that. Also you have to cover the domain and hosting costs. But I wish you the best. I like your blog.
Hey Leon,
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the sites have REALLY bad optimization. I’m pretty sure there is a way to change this on datafeed.
It’s a weird strategy. It was something covered in the Aff Playbook masterclasses so I just took it and ran with it. I asked the same questions as you did but it seems overtime certain posts/pages will rank here and there on google and will get you sales. I’ve already got one sale @ $20 commission somehow lol.
People somehow will find things, especially when you have 10,000+ posts out there in the search engines. Well, I hope they do 😛
Let’s give it a couple more months and see!
~ Mateen
So how are these sites getting traffic? Does google just rank them highly due to obscure terms?
I’m hoping, out of the 10s of thousands of pages in Google Search engines, they’ll pick up obscure terms. Sales have started to be more consistent this month, (October – 2-3 months after I started this), so it some-what works lol. Just need to see if it can make anything substantial.
Hi Mateen,
Read several posts and I am also using Datafeedr. Pls tell me how your datafeedr sites performed the last months?
Hey,
Quite bad actually. They’ve done between $10-$100/m, nothing big. I think there was a problem with how I set it up. That or my strategy was a fail lol.
Hi,
My initial thought was that these sites will hardly rank as they have duplicate content all over the place. Rankings might change if you had at least some faqs relevant to the topic or some pages with unique content on the mid to long tail side of the keywords.
Any update on your experiment? Has the performance improved?
With $100/month you are not even recovering the cost for hosting& domains and the datafeedr plugin, are you?
Best
Martin
Hello Martin,
Apart from the random sale here and there I didn’t make anything consistent. I ditched this one a while back.
I know some people are definitely making money from it though. Not sure if I missed a step but I’d rather something long term anyway.
– Mateen