jMoore!

During the 5 years that I’ve been an affiliate, I haved tried to pay attention to what works for people that I know are successful. Even if I don’t know their websites, I listen to the topics they discuss and then use that information as a study list. Over and over again I revisit the idea of learning how to manipulate a datafeed so I can create a product site on steroids.

My first efforts were wasted on trying to read and understand the available manuals on MYSQL and PHP. I combined that trip through the pointless forest with asking questions of my geek sons, who only heard what they thought I was saying, which is spend a year of your life trying to build something for Mom. They didn’t say no, they just kept starting at the beginning of how to relate tables, which was not where my knowledge gap lives.

My next project actually brought me much closer to understanding some aspects of how to use datafeeds and also made me some money moving niche products. This was back a couple of years ago, when Carolyn Tang at ShareASale took the time to teach and promote the use of WebMerge, which is an application that takes a datafeed and creates static pages for you to upload. I was able to create 300, 400, even 1800 pages in about 10 minutes once I mastered the template creation part. And suddenly the products were selling because Google had something to index.

That spurred me on, but my “hit the wall” moment was when the merchant provided datafeed continually took me a week to clean up each time. By the time I got it cleaned up to use, it was time to start over. About that time, GoldenCan was peaking in popularity and I went back to using it almost exclusively with some success.

When PopShops came along, I loved it. I started testing GoldenCan pages vs PopShop pages and found that they were fairly equal in success. The real trick there is to surround them with some unique content that will keep them in the search engines, since the products themselves are being updated automatically when the datafeed updates, so everyone using these categories is going to have the same catalog on their site. You have some control over what’s showing, but you have to be creative in assembling your shops.

Just before Christmas I started some trial and error building with Datafeedr. (Disclosure: Affiliate link) This is an affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress that allows you to build any size store for your niche in a quick and easy way. Finally, just today I joined their affiliate program because even though I find some limitations in the program, I think that there are some positives that could be leveraged to increase your income.

Here’s what I’ve learned – good and bad – about this fairly simple site creation tool:

Negatives (for me, anyway)

• You have to be hosted on a Linux or Unix server. I’m not talking about your home machines; I’m talking about the hosting company you use for your sites. I use one hosting company that is exclusively Windows servers and so I moved a couple of sites over to the other hosting company in order to use Datafeedr.
• There are minimum PHP and MYSQL requirements. I’m still procrastinating on one site because it has a pretty big content database and I don’t want to risk breaking it while I upgrade the MYSQL. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then make sure you check your host for availability of the minimum requirements before you jump off the cliff
• The plugin gets upgraded pretty frequently to keep up with Wordpress changes and to add more and more networks to the affiliate merchant choices. The plugin is just enough different from typical Workpress plugins to be an irritant when it’s time to upgrade. It’s not that hard, or even time consuming, but you DO have to read the instructions and then pay attention or you’ll spend the rest of the hour banging your head on the desk.

Positives

• There are some excellent videos that show you exactly how to build a store, download the feed, activate the plug-in, etc. I’m more a reader-writer than a talker-listener, so I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a tutorial for people like me. Dave, however, watched the first video a couple of times and he was off…. building and maintaining several sites in the first couple of days.
• There’s almost too much product selection. That’s a good thing if you understand that a good niche is often a narrow niche. Be disciplined in your product selection; they have an awesome tagging set-up, and you’ll have more success. If you get carried away trying to be everything to everybody, you’re going to get a datafeed store so huge you’ll have trouble loading it automatically and will have to load it manually.
• The best positive of all for me is that one site I built is making more in commission than I’m paying for the 5 site package. The ability to upgrade your package was the closer for me because I didn’t want to pay for unlimited when I procrastinate everything, even making money.
• The aforementioned site was built for a domain name I’ve had parked for almost 2 years. I installed Wordpress a couple of months before I added the Datafeedr store and until I did the Datafeedr thing, the site was just sitting there with Hello World, or whatever that initial WP post is.
• I picked a pretty wide niche, but I narrowed it down by selecting almost a dozen categories within that niche. Using those same categories on Datafeedr, I picked products and picked products until I had an 18,000 product store, which meant I had to ftp it manually after several hours of being frustrated that the automatic upload didn’t work.
• Before I got the new header images built for the theme, I had sales. I was flabbergasted and felt like it was probably a fluke, but within days I was even getting small sales on merchants who were represented on the site only with a small banner in the sidebar. These guys weren’t even in the feed, so it was probably general traffic for that niche rather than any long-tale keyword that was being exploited.

Bottom line: Even though I’m part of their affiliate program now, I would only recommend Datafeedr if you’re already familiar with Wordpress enough to add and subtract plugins. I think you need at least that level of competence before you start paying for a datafeed source. If you already understand how to use a datafeed, then you don’t need Datafeedr. If you’re like me and understand the concept, understand the need to learn and just can’t make the jump into downloading a merchant feed, cleaning it up to match your own server, writing the php calls to get the information back down on your page the way you want it, then Datafeedr is probably going to help you make money.

I was concerned about the cost in the beginning, but I gave it the 3 month try at the 5 site package, which is just under $50 a month. Like I said, that one site exceeded that in the first 45 days. I am currently evaluating all my domains to see which ones can continue to produce with GoldenCan and PopShop and which ones could use the boost of Datafeedr. I may drop back to the 1 site package, which is $27 a month, or I may be able to justify the $97 unlimited package. I don’t like to waste money, though, so the $47 is probably where I’ll be for another couple of months.