Affiliate Program Primer
© 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.net Ever since Amazon launched what is perhaps the most well-known, but not the first, affiliate program in 1996, other merchants in every business category imaginable have followed suit. And even though...read more...

How to Be a TOP Earner
I hope that your new year is off to as incredible a start as mine is. I have something that I want to share with you, if you apply it, you will make 2006 the year that completely turns your life around. One of my New Year resolutions...read more...

3 Simple Steps For Newbies To Start In Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an arrangement between an online merchant and affiliate, in which the affiliate earns a commission for generating sales, leads and/or clicks for the merchant's web site. Affiliate marketing works in a win-win situation...read more...

Starting an Online Home Business Affiliate Programs Make it Easy
If you have been longing to start a home business online you may be coming across terms you've never heard before. You may also have found the opportunities available are overwhelming. Where do you begin? AFFILIATE PROGRAMS - EASY START ...read more...

Lessons Learned From Affiliate Programs
Don't create a site just to sell products or services through one or multiple affiliate programs because you will mostly likely end up spending more in advertising than what you will make on commissions. I can almost guarantee that you will...read more...

Affiliate Marketing for Newbies
If you're an affiliate marketer and you are directing traffic straight to your affiliate link, then you are doing it all wrong. By making this common mistake you are missing out on a huge income potential. A better way to set up your...read more...

Make Money Online Scam or Reality
Everyone dreams about making money online, but can it be a reality or will you get sucked into scams that promise great income and never deliver? Well, the good news is there are legitimate ways that you can make money online. The difficult...read more...

18 avoidable errors and tips when promoting your affiliate program
A few avoidable errors when promoting your affiliate program In this article, I have listed a quick and easy bulleted list of does and do not's when trying to promote your affiliate program. " Many affiliate marketers make a huge mistake of...read more...

Customers As Your Viral Affiliates
Private customer sales are very effective ways to get viral marketing started for your own web site. All that you have to do is provide them with a special incentive for that they can use, but also send to their friends and family. You do it by...read more...

Explode your Downline Using the Power of the Internet
Did you just start a home-based business? Did you just join a multi-level marketing business opportunity? Or do you want to start your own downline but you donít know where to begin? If you said yes to all, then there is an immediate need to...read more...

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!?

href="http://www.naturehillsaffiliates.com/templatesite/index.php">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:

href="http://rosalinds.com/CandyCrate/">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.

An alternative to ?Webmerge'is Mark Hendricks' and Frank Sousa's ?Secret Money Generator' software. ?Secret Money Generator' makes product datafeeds even easier to manipulate. SMG allows you to build thousands of content rich, search engine friendly, static web pages which come complete with graphics and order links with your affiliate IDs embedded in them - all in just a few seconds!

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.
Article by Rosalind Gardner, speaker, consultant and 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 suceed in Internet and affiliate marketing, sign up for Rosalind's "Net Profits Today" newsletter at:
NetProfitsToday.com

Written by: Rosalind Gardner