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.
Learn more about:
Webmerge
ShareaSale
Author's Resource: Article by Rosalind Gardner, author of the best-selling "Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online". To learn how you too can succeed in Internet and affiliate marketing, please visit http://NetProfitsToday.com
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