Web Marketing Strategy Update

This is something I rarely talk about, but datafeeds are a great way to make money with affiliate programs.

A datafeed is essentially a product database that merchants make available for their affiliates to download.

The data is contained in a large text file, with one product per line. Each line will contain things like the product name, its code number, price, description, order link, and image links.

These different bits of information are usually separated by commas or tab stops, (although the pipe (|) symbol is sometimes used), leading to comma-separated value, .csv or tab-separated value, .tsv files.

Whilst the datafeed might look like an unreadable mess in a text editor, if you open the file in spreadsheet software like Excel or Filemaker, you will see the information is actually in neat columns as defined by the commas or tabs.

You can buy software and scripts (or roll your own) to manipulate this data to create websites with hundreds, even thousands of pages in no time.

These can be static pages pages you upload to your server, or dynamically generated on the fly as the page is requested (my personal preference).

Not being my usual area of reading, I can’t remember how I came across In The Blog Commons: What is Uncommon? the other day. An interesting response from Stowe Boyd to Seth Godin’s The noisy tragedy of the blog commons post last week.

Personally, I think Stowe’s argument makes more sense. And if we look at the printed word, cable, or even the internet itself, in each case easier and cheaper means of production led to a lot of junk, but in the final analysis people also got what they deemed as valuable to them.

It may well be that you need to sow a big field for everyone to find their wheat, and that will mean a lot of chaff too….