I am not going to describe what a product feed (or a data-feed) is. There is a lot of information out there about how to use one to build sites. Instead, I want to talk about how you can actually make more sales with data-feed sites.The program that I manage offers a product feed, and I get a chance to see a sad picture of many good affiliates wasting their potential.
Here is my advice from
affiliate manager's perspective.
Whenever you join (or think bout joining) a program, you need to look for two things: - Temporary or permanent opportunities - Flaws of a merchant
Here is an example of an opportunity that was created by an outside factor.
Recently, we got removed from Yahoo index because of a penalty. I have no idea when (or if) we will get included back in, but I do know that it makes one decision much easier for our affiliates.
Judging by numerous posts on various SEO-related message boards, it looks like Google and Yahoo use very different algorithms to rank pages. So for any given site, you have a choice to make. You can optimize for Yahoo, for Google, or for both.
Since Yahoo and Google use different algorithms, it is going to be hard to optimize same set of pages for both of those engines at same time, unless you employ heavy cloaking. And way I see it, for an affiliate, it is better to appear high on one search engine than to appear low on both of them in an attempt to optimize for different algorithms at same time.
Imagine that you are one of our affiliates. Given information I just told you, shouldn't you concentrate on Yahoo for that data-feed site that is being used to promote our products?
Why spend (at least) half of your time and resources on optimizing for Google when you know that we are nowhere to be found in Yahoo?
You have to have an extremely well linked and optimized site to get ahead of merchant for exact product-name search terms. The merchant is your biggest obstacle when it comes to search engine traffic. So if there is a route that lets you get around that obstacle - take it!
Most of our well-performing affiliates did just that. Either intentionally or unintentionally, they ended up making much more money by appearing high in Yahoo results, while not being ranked high in Google.
So on a practical side of things, here is what you should do.
For your existing merchants, check if they are removed from index in any of major search engines, and if they are, then start reading and implementing SEO tips for that particular engine.
And if you are thinking about joining a program and can't decide between several merchants, then check if any of them is not in index of either Yahoo or Google. If you find a merchant like that - drop everything else you are doing and jump on that program.
