Coupon Feeds and Holiday Marketing

Michael Garrity — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

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.

Datafeed Solutions that Work

Linc Wonham — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:30:00 GMT

Datafeeds are both valuable files and processes for transferring product information from one system to another in a predetermined form for e-commerce merchants and their affiliate partners. There is no more powerful method for retailers to distribute all of their product data across multiple channels, and no faster solution for affiliates to import that data onto their own websites or applications.

But they can also be complicated to use, cumbersome to manage and they require a certain level of technical expertise. The SEO benefits of highly integrated datafeeds can also be lost without the proper know-how, and merchants and affiliates who do not proceed with care risk not being properly attributed and, in some cases, even alienting their users.

There are, however, a number of third-party datafeed aggregators that aim to simplify the process. Below, then, are some of today's solution providers in the affiliate datafeed space:

PopShops
Regarded as the most popular affiliate feed aggregator with more than 60 million products and deals in its database, PopShops is a free tool for merchants and offers some additional premium services for affiliates on top of its basic no-cost package. SEO features include server-side snippets of PHP that will render product names, descriptions and other content to users and the search engines at the most basic level, and the premium plans include keyword customization, dynamic search, custom redirects, profiles and stylesheets.

GoldenCAN
The second-leading provider in the space, GoldenCAN has SEO benefits that include a strong internal linking structure that can dramatically influence search rankings, as well as options for optimized code and content. Their fee structure leaves something to be desired for some affiliates, however, with two categories of merchants. The first group is the Free of 4th Click Merchants, in which affiliates pay no share of their traffic and receive 100 percent of the commissions from the merchants in that category. Affiliates share 25 percent of their traffic with GoldenCAN for the second merchant group, and for every 4th click generated GoldenCAN replaces the affiliate site ID with its own and subsequently gets that commission should the 4th click convert into a sale, order or lead.

FeedShare
After PopShops and GoldenCAN, the space drops off considerably, but more than 2,500 affiliates use FeedShare’s 89 available datafeeds that currently include about 1.5 million products. Merchants using the FeedShare solution include Overstock.com, and 93 percent of them continue to use the service after the free 30-day trial. The service is completely free for affiliates with no charges or percentages of commissions given to FeedShare.

Datafeedr
This is a WordPress plugin that has become a very popular method for users to create and embed their own affiliate shops into their WordPress blogs. Datafeedr makes the store creation as easy as possible and to date has aggregated more than 104 million products from 16 affiliate networks. WordPress users can search the products by keyword or niche and promote as many products from as many merchants and networks as they want. Pricing runs from $27 per month for one store with unlimited product updates to $97 per month for unlimited stores and higher-level SEO features.

'Net Features : datafeeds

Coupon Feeds and Holiday Marketing

Datafeed Solutions that Work