Survey Sez
Ros Raves about 'Quick Sites'
Can you build a 1,000-page affiliate site in mere seconds? Sure you can...and will... just read today's NPC.
Before you do that however, I just want to let you know that Joel Christopher has extended his early-bird deadline for his Double Birthday Bash with Ted Nicholas until Valentine's Day (February 14th for the unromantics :-))
You can also hear each of the speakers (including yours truly) at the special preview calls. Check it out at:
Double Birthday Bash
Next, I was ecstatic to learn that Dan Kennedy is going to be at Yanik's underground seminar. I read 3 of his books in the first week of 2005, and the man is brilliant. He won't be speaking, but we'll still be able to talk to him. Learn more about the Underground here:
Underground Seminar
'Til next time, learn and prosper!
Rosalind
Rosalind Gardner is author of the best-selling "Super
Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in ONE Year Selling
Other People's Stuff Online.
Super Affiliate Handbook
Upcoming Seminars
What: eComXpo
Where: Online
When: February 17 - 19th, 2005
Too many exhibitors to list, but let's start with ALL the big named affiliate marketing networks and ALL the affiliate marketing stars. Oh, and not just a few outstanding merchants with affiliate programs either.
eComXpo
What: Joel Christopher and Ted
Nicholas' 'Double Birthday Bash'
Where: San Antonio, Texas
When: March 18th and 19th, 2005
Also featuring illustrious names such as Joe Vitale, Jay Conrad Levinson, John 'The Street Kid' Assaraf, Brian Keith Voiles, Tom 'Big Al' Schreiter, Sydney "Queen of eBay" Johnston, Tom Antion, Shawn Casey, Marc Goldman, Alan Bechtold & 2 'Mystery Guests'
'Double Birthday Bash'
What: Yanik Silver's 'Underground' seminar
Where: Washington, D.C.,
When: April 28 - 30, 2005.
I could tell you who's gonna be there, but then it wouldn't be the 'Underground' seminar... so just click the link below... and shhhhhhh.
'Underground' seminar.
How to Build a 1,000-Page Content Site in Mere
Seconds!
Building an affiliate
web site that sells between 5 and 20 products is relatively quick and easy to
accomplish.
An experienced webmaster can put a site like 101Date.com,
which has only 11 services, together in a day. Someone else might spend a week
signing up for the programs, designing a template, and adding product
information and affiliate links.
Spending a week or even a month on a site that delivers big
rewards over the years is a relatively minor investment.
But how much time and
effort is invested by affiliates who sell items like magazines, garden
products, posters, t-shirts or lingerie? Or, how difficult would it be to
place links to music CD's, or movie DVD's on your
site? Merchants in those categories typically carry hundreds or even thousands
of items.
Sure, a MoJoSounds.com affiliate might want to promote only
adventure movies, but his state of mind might be a ‘horror' by the time he's
input more than 500 descriptions, links and graphics!
If the same affiliate planned to let his visitors know about
the latest and greatest discounts by listing prices, would he ever get any
sleep?
Sure he would!
By using the MoJoSounds.com product datafeed,
that affiliate could build a 500+ item site in less than an hour. He could even
build a 10,000 item site in less than an hour!
So what's a product datafeed?
A product datafeed is a
spreadsheet or text file which typically lists product names along with their
categories and subcategories, descriptions, coded affiliate links, product
graphic image URL's, prices and even applicable keywords.
Affiliates can manipulate datafeeds
in various ways to display content on their sites.
Those with programming knowledge may insert the feed into
databases on their servers.
Other affiliates prefer to use dynamic website templates that some merchants offer. These
templates are completely customizable and the resulting site automatically
updates itself.
One company that offers a dynamic website template is ShareaSale
merchant, Nature Hill's Nursery. Shawn
at Nature Hills sent me a zipped package containing their template files, and I
discovered that setting up a dynamic template on my site was incredibly easy to
do!
Using my HTML editor, Homesite
5.0, I simply added my affiliate I.D. to the config.pl file, and uploaded the
files to the /Nature-Hills/ directory that I created at Rosalinds.com. The site
then looked and worked exactly like it does at the URL below, but with my
affiliate ID coded into the links… all 1295 products!
Nature Hills' Template
After making a few design changes to the template, this is
how it looks now at:
Rosalind's Nature Hill's site
Unfortunately, dynamic
templates generally work only on servers running PHP and MYSQL. However,
affiliates whose hosts do not run PHP and MYSQL can still profit from product datafeeds by building static pages on their computer using Richard
Gaskin's WebMerge.
Here is a site that
I built using a 593-product datafeed from Candy Crate
(another ShareaSale merchant), Webmerge,
and the same template that I used for the Nature Hills site:
Rosalind's Candy Crate Site
I'm terrible at
reading instructions, so Webmerge posed a bit of a
challenge for me to use at first. However, after reading the tutorials, asking
Richard a few questions, and spending some time on the Datafeeds
forum at ABestWeb.com, the software was easy to figure out.
Now, with a site standard
template and Webmerge files, I can build a 10, 20 or
30,000 product site in mere seconds with the push of a button.
So, to save time and make more sales, be on the lookout for
merchants with product datafeeds. My daddy always
said, ‘Work smarter, not harder', and affiliate marketing doesn't get much
smarter or easier than this.
Webmerge
Publish any database or spreadsheet
with templates from any HTML editor
on any Web server.
And then automate it.
Yep. It's that easy.
Webmerge
Article Update
Here is a cautionary about using datafeed processing software like Webmerge to generate thousands of pages on your affiliate sites.
Originally merchant datafeeds were reserved for "premium partners" or Super Duper affiliates.
As datafeeds were made available to all and sundry, an amazing amount of datafeed search engine spam starting showing up around Internet town.
Affiliates were generating hundreds of thousands of pages using datafeeds, cluttering the SERP's with listings of little or no value.
To curb the crap, Google began delisting obvious affiliate datafeed sites, around the middle of 2004.
However, webmasters who customize their datafeed pages with content have been untouched by Google, as it should be.
Adding content, REAL value for your visitors, always has been and always will be the best way to keep your business in Google's favor.
Was there ever any doubt?
BTW, Webmerge isn't just for processing merchant datafeeds.
I've prepared my own datafeeds of the products I review and promote here at NetProfitsToday.com, and have used Webmerge to create the following directories:
