Let's go over a few examples that should illustrate true power of this approach.

I'll assume that merchant we are working with sells widgets of various kinds. You looked over feed and saw that merchant has some porcelain widgets; red and blue, large and small. One of synonyms for porcelain is ceramic, so first thing you would do is replace word porcelain with ceramic in all product names and descriptions.

This can be done by adding following commands to a sed script file before running it against feed:

s/porcelain/ceramic/g s/Porcelain/Ceramic/g

Those commands will replace your keywords while preserving capitalization. So that a title like "Big Blue Porcelain Widget" becomes "Big Blue Ceramic Widget."

To make things more interesting, let's assume that feed already has some ceramic widgets aside from porcelain ones. So you do not want to end up with just one kind. Instead, you want to switch them around. Remember, your goal is to be as different from original feed as possible.

You can achieve that with following set of commands:

s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g s/ceramic/porcelain/g s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g

In example above, I used MYTEMPKEYWORD as a place-holder. That let us make sure that we are not losing original keywords.

What happens there is:

all "porcelain" is changed to "MYTEMPKEYWORD' then all "ceramic" is changed to "porcelain" then all "MYTEMPKEYWORD" (which used to be original porcelain) is changed to "ceramic"

and then same thing should be done for all capitalized keywords.

You can use anything in place of MYTEMPKEYWORD as long as it does not already appear in feed. You want to use some unique keyword.

Once you are done with those keywords, you can change something like "Metallic" to "Shiny Metal Finish" -- assuming that makes sense for a given product line.

Adding that to a command file would give you:

s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g s/ceramic/porcelain/g s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g s/Porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g s/Ceramic/Porcelain/g s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/Ceramic/g s/Metallic/Shiny Metal Finish/g s/metallic/shiny metal finish/g

That would also change "Blue Metallic Widget" to "Blue Metal-Looking Finish Widget."

As I said earlier, you can add as many commands as you want for different words and phrases. And with enough such small changes, you will be able to reach traffic that is not already covered by your competing affiliates. While a few hundred affiliates with their data feed sites might be displayed for a keyword "blue porcelain widget" -- there might be just a few (if any) covering "blue ceramic widget" for same merchant.

Even something like

s/TV Set/Television Set/g

along with diagonal sizes and brand names might help you stand apart from rest of affiliates who use same feed. Any change is better than having same exact content as others.

I encourage you to download a copy of sed and check it out. Once you get a hang of it, you will be able to automate whole process. And if you are already using scripts to refresh merchants' feeds and rebuild sites automatically, then you can plug sed in middle and modify feeds on fly.

Also, if you are having a hard time coming up with words to replace, you might want to check out Princeton's WordNet. You can even download word database and use it locally on your desktop.

Konstantin Goudkov manages an affiliate program with a merchant that carries 2500+ gifts. If you enjoy working with companies that treat affiliates like valued partners then be sure to check us out.