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).

Over time though, changes to the search engines such as a greater focus on links and anchor text, and more attention to duplicate content, have made it increasingly difficult to get decent rankings with a vanilla datafeed-based website.

The rise in popularity of datafeeds has exacerbated the problem, creating the situation where hundreds of websites are loaded with the exact same information. Making your content unique enough to stand out from the rest in order to attract both inbound links and the attention of search engines is not an easy job (dynamic generation is an advantage here).

For these reasons, as well as ease of production, I’ve recently been looking into combining datafeeds with blogs.

At the moment, blogs are the darlings of the search engines. They love the regular updating of content, and in a whole new twist for webmasters, they, along with numerous other cataloging services, actually want your blog to ping and tell them to come and take a look every time you add content!

With the wealth of plugins available, blogs are also ideal for mixing and matching content and presenting it in a variety of ways. With RSS feeds, articles, datafeeds, and a little bit of work, it’s really not that difficult to ensure that your blog is not only unique and interesting, but also profitable.

Anyway, this post is getting really long, and I need to stop and get some sleep! But if these ideas interest you, I suggest you get on Google sooner rather than later and start weighing up what’s available.

I’ve already done my research. After scouring the internet for all the possible options from DIY scripts to plug-n-play software, and spending hours more reading sales letters, FAQs and reviews, I think this is the best option, beating everything else in terms of power, ease, flexibility and value.