Adult Affiliate Guide

As you learn more and more about the affiliate industry by perusing affiliate forums, network creative offerings and simply chatting with other affiliates, you'll notice that the term "datafeed" comes up more and more. But what exactly is a datafeed, and how can it benefit your affiliate marketing plans?

What are datafeeds, anyway?

A "datafeed" (also referred to as a "product feed") is code offered by affiliate programs that enables you to display an automatically generated and updated product guide on your website. This product guide generally features a small image of the product, a brief description of the product and a price. Datafeeds are often broken down into categories and SKU numbers, enabling you as an affiliate to display only products by the categories or SKUs of your choice.

What are the benefits of datafeeds?

For Merchants

Datafeeds offer many benefits, both from a merchant perspective as well as an affiliate's. Merchants that benefit the most from datafeeds are generally retail in nature and offer a large number of products in a number of categories and are regularly adding to their product roster. One perfect example would be a ticketing merchant such as Celebrity Seats, who add hundreds of tickets to their database and datafeed on a daily basis.

Merchants that are regularly updating pricing (through regular sales, etc.) can also benefit from the datafeed. The datafeed allows merchants to include all of their products as potential offerings to their affiliates through the maintenance of a feed, as opposed to relying on product-specific banners or text links.

For Affiliates

The job of a search engine is to give the Web shopper the most relevant results. Just like in the Yellow Pages, you wouldn't want to flip to auto parts, call the number listed in the biggest ad on the page only to be connected with a plumber just because the plumber happened to pay extra money to get listed in auto parts ad because he knew that's what people were looking for. In the early days of the Internet, things like that did happen. There was much abuse when it came to keywords like adding popular keywords to a site and making them only visible to the search engines. Or, adding keywords in the code that weren't site relevant, but were very popular searches – sex, for example. Fortunately, the search engines cracked down on this kind of practice and in order to rank high in the search results not only do you need keyword-rich copy, but this copy needs to be added to and updated frequently.

What the Spiders are Looking For

Spiders crawl the web regularly to re-index pages,and they particularly love Websites that are frequently updated with fresh content and information. This includes adding new pages to your site. A good rule of thumb is the more pages, the better. Why is this? As I mentioned above, it is the job of the search engine to give the Web shopper the most relevant and up-to-date information possible. That's what users are looking for – the latest information. Therefore, when you add fresh content to you site on a regular basis, the search engines will pick up on this.

Quality Content Makes for a Quality Website

Affiliate marketing is a low risk, high potential business. This is one of the reasons that it is becoming so popular. Many new entrepreneurs start their businesses off with affiliate programs. Here are some of the reasons why this business model is considered low risk:

1. Low start up costs: Affiliate programs are usually free to join. Tools and ad copy come with the package and the only expense incurred will be the cost of promotion. Of course you will be starting your own website and newsletter, but this will not really cost too much. If you start with a simple website template you can actually do it yourself. There are no office expenses or employee overheads.

2. No inventory: Of course you will not have to buy product, except for personal use. This saves a lot of money and means you will not have the risk of having to keep unsold inventory.

3. No Employees: You don't need employees to pay or hassle with. The only time you will have to pay people to work for you is when you outsource or hire others for a project. You can do this fairly cheaply when you use freelancers.

4. Very Little Customer support: One of the best parts about affiliate marketing is the fact that there is little or no customer service needed. Usually your sponsor as the actual seller will handle all this.

Of course affiliate marketing has a lot of potential. This will depend on exactly how hard you wish to work your business. In fact once you have done your research into each and every promotion you do, you will be seeing good returns on your advertising dollar. Even with affiliate marketing you cannot expect too much for the first three months but after that it will increase as you expend promotions and gather tools, so that you will realize a growing return on investment.

The key to success is to know your market. When you understand your market and what they need, you will be able to choose the right programs that have products to fulfill this need. It is just a question of finding a need and being able to fulfill it.

You will need to find a niche market to make the most profit. Research this well as this is where the money is to be made. How do you uncover these niche or specialized markets? You look on overture search tool and find out what people have been searching for. This will be your demand. Then you go to the search engines and put in the same keywords and find out how many websites come up. This will be your supply. Then you find a topic that is high in demand and low in supply. This will be your niche market.

Try to build a website which will have a landing place for your visitors. Develop it into a theme content website which pre-sells to your visitors and encourage them to click through to your sponsor’s website. When you warm your visitors for the sale, by informative and interesting content they will then be more inclined to buy.

Next you must find a way to capture the email addresses of your visitors and build your business list. You can do this by generating a free newsletter. Place your subscription box on your website landing page and drive traffic to it.

The key to success is knowing your market, exploring their needs and finding products to fulfill them. Your job is then to get a high click through rate to links that make you money. You can then start to earn commissions on the sales your visitors make.

Article syndication is a powerful way to promote your business and drive traffic to your site. You can not only promote your business but also yourself as an expert in your field. However, in order to make this effective it is important to do it right. Here are three steps to follow:.

1. Your bio box: Be sure to include a compelling bio box that will encourage readers to click through to your website. This is just like an expanded version of your email signature file. It should not be more than 5-6 lines. It should include your name with one to two lines about who you are and what you do. Try to include a free gift like your newsletter and a list of your website URL’s.

2. Content: Make your articles interesting and informative. Readers should be drawn into them and enjoy the article so much that they want to know more and will click through to your website. You can include in your articles information about your product or service, product reviews, in the news topics about your industry. Helpful tips and instructions about how to use a piece of software that you are selling, and even some humorous antidotes and stories relating to your product, service and industry.

3. Use a service or software that includes article directories as well as lists. Both lists and directories will give you traffic but directories will give you valuable back links. These links will help to raise your Page Rank in Google and improve your position in the search engines.

4. Focus on 1-2 big article syndicators. Checkout ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Both are highly rated services to distribute your articles