We’re in the thick of the holiday shopping season and, for affiliate marketers, that means this is the best time of year to try new things and make some extra money. So, if you’re not already using coupon feeds, you probably should be, especially now while consumers are out there looking for the best deals possible. (Seriously, have you seen what people are willing to do for Black Friday sales?)

Coupon feeds (or deal feeds) are RSS syndication tools that affiliate marketers use to promote merchant coupons, discounts and sales to visitors of the affiliate’s site(s). The payoff is that when visitors subscribe to receive merchant offers that they see on the site, the publisher’s unique affiliate ID is embedded in all outbound links from the feed, meaning they get credit for that customer for the life of the feed subscription.

Coupon feeds are ideal for affiliates operating during the holiday marketing season because they can easily be integrated onto your sites, and if you can hit the right niche audience and get them to sign up for subscriptions (and they use the information in these feeds to buy things), you will earn money for each purchase promoted in the feed. This could easily lead to repeat transactions (based on new or continued deals), for which you will still be compensated because you’re credited with that customer.

Save Time (And Money)
One important thing that coupon feeds do for affiliates is save time. No longer will you have to worry about manually altering and adding new deals to your site, as it becomes the merchant’s task to input new data into the feed, which will update automatically for you.

If you’ve ever had to add-to or change promotional content on your Web pages (and I’m sure you have), then you’re well aware of how much of a time-suck it can be. Utilizing coupon feeds as a publisher does away with a lot of that burden and frees you up to be able to focus your efforts on more productive endeavors with more immediate monetary consequences.

Coupon feeds allow you more time to focus on your site’s layout, the best way to combine offers/deals and what to feature where, data analysis and merchant relationships. All of these projects will result in better ROIs than spending your time with data entry, making coupon feeds both convenient and profitable.

Where to Go
Although coupon feeds aren’t exactly ubiquitous among the affiliate marketing community, they’re still very popular; and there are plenty of options for affiliates to choose from when it comes to selecting the right feed provider.

For Me To Coupon is a company that offers an automated, customized affiliate coupon feed which consolidates 19,297 deals from 5179 merchant programs, making it one of the largest coupon feed providers available. In addition, the service provides manual review and data entry to ensure that deals that get sent out do not contain errors in links, codes or text, which essentially means they do all of the work for you. You can try the service for a 30-day free trial, with various service packages ranging from $195 - $1,495 a month.

Affiliate marketing platform  AvantLink also has a strong coupon feed program as a part of its services that makes it possible for affiliates to secure long-term earning potential, provide an easy subscription option to customers and syndicate merchant promotions through tracking links. These tools are totally free to affiliates who qualify for the AvantLink network.

The popular ShareASale affiliate network also offers a Deals Database to its affiliate partners. The company is strongly committed to offering special Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals in its Deals Database, and though it may be too late for to take advantage of them this year, they could always come in handy in 2012.

Online coupon provider FindSavings offers a variety of coupon feeds in different categories, coupon types and stores. These are highly detailed and can be easily integrated into a user’s website, as the site provides the XML coding needed to embed the feed. And the best part is, they offer them free of charge. 

Finally, PopShops affiliate marketing service has its own coupon and deals database for all of its affiliate partners. The deals are updated 24/7 and originate from feeds, program newsletters, network dashboards, and even exclusive deals direct from the merchants. Like For Me To Coupon, PopShops also provides a crack team of investigative copy editors to ensure that all of the deals and coupons passes quality standards.

It’s not too late, and now is a great time to start utilizing coupon feeds on your sites to save you a lot of time this holiday season that can be better spent optimizing your campaigns to show the best ROI possible.