Convert Affiliate Datafeeds to RSS?

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

I, have been bitten HARD by the RSS bug and have also had lots of affiliates asking for a tool that converts merchant datafeeds to RSS. I have been collecting all kinds of bookmarks on everything RSS, but have specifially trying hard to find tools that bridge the datafeed to RSS gap.

http://www.rsstoblog.com/ Offers a bonus that tells you how to - but does not sound ideal.

Amazing Affiliate Datafeed Bonus Offer ...
"Imagine a blog updating itself with links and descriptions of affiliate merchant data everyday. How much money do you think you can make? There are literally thousands of merchants who offer datafeeds for free. To make the most of those feeds up until now you needed a MYSQL driven website to display the data, but now you can add these datafeeds to RSS to Blog and build an powerful affiliate blog that will generate some heavy duty income for you! As a bonus I am going to include a tutorial that shows you exactly how to clean a datafeed for insertion into RSS to Blog, so that you can begin making money right away."

There is also this one which is a collection of tools. http://www.feedprocessor.com/home_overview.html

Here is that part that converts to RSS: "The Syndicator tool exports product name, description and URL information into either RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3 syndication format. You can then publish the feed directly from your website, or make use of other tools designed to work with RSS or Atom format XML files."

Neither of these options sounds ideal to me, but I have not tried them. Does anyone know of a simple all-in-one solution that will convert CSV or other standard datafeed file formats to an RSS feed???

Linda AKA Catalyst

Hi Linda,

I added the Syndicator tool "due to popular demand", but to be brutally honest with you I have absolutely no idea what people are actually doing with it other than creating feeds for use with other tools like RSS to Blog.

By "all-in-one" solution, are you looking for something that is a standalone program (a la WebMerge) that runs on your local computer and will take a datafeed as input and output the RSS file?

That aside, I'd still like to understand more about the objective. I can't contemplate a scenario in which a visitor comes along to a website and decides to subscribe to an RSS version of an affiliate product data feed - it just doesn't make sense (for BIG feeds anyway). Therefore, i'm left thinking that the only possible reason for wanting to do this is for content generation; in which case what is to be gained by re-sampling the feed into RSS? Surely you can create a far more compelling website by making use of other tools and all fields in a product data feed rather than just the 3 that map to RSS convention (product name=title, description=description, affiliate url=link)....

Cheers,
David.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hi David,

Thanks for stopping by! I have not had anyone spell out why they want a tool like this but I get requests and see questions about this in a lot of forums and I know there is a market. In fact just found a couple other programs specifically for datafeed to RSS conversion.

I can see lots of reasons affiliates would want a tool like this. The reason I said it needs to be all-in-one and easy is that my strong guess is the affiliates that want this are not feed programmer types that would want to buy and learn webmerge. So it has to be easy. The application would be to easily add product content to blogs for both monetization as well as more spiderfood. So if you have a blog about entertainment you can a add concert ticket feed to the concert page, sports memorabilia to the sports page and display a CD feed on the music page. (The idea is not to get customers to subscribe to feed, I think they just see it as a quick way to add content.)

The other aspect that I think affiliates are looking for is auto updating. Not sure this is possible, but I think they are visualizing adding one line of code – just like you do when you syndicate another blog and VIOLA – instant self updating content. It seems to me this would work best if the MERCHANT was offering the feed as RSS.

Ok, I found the program I was looking for, it was right under my nose. They link to me (with a bad link) and one of the datafeed articles I published. I checked it out a long time ago but thought is was a regular datafeed program. Yesterday when I was researching I came across it again and read in detail and this is exactly what I was talking about. buyitbomb.com. Don’t know that this is the easiest or best, but if you read the copy you see all the applications and why it would appeal to affiliates if it’s really this good and easy. I found a couple others too but they sound too ebook hypey, get-rich-quick for me to take seriously. Just found a forum where some affiliates have tried some of the programs and are comparing features and ease, so I’m going back there to do some more research today.

I’m still looking for other programs if anyone knows of any. I will probably end up writing an article and building a page full of options for affiliates. So David, if you end up deciding to write a program specifically for this app please let me know.

Anyone else have any ideas or thoughts on this topic?

[AMWSO]

Ultimately what is needed is a script on the affiliates end that can pick up the RSS feed and display it in much the same way it would pick up and grab a normal datafeed, storing the data locally so that the pages are generated before hand, and not using a Java Script or other 'on the fly systems' .

At this point the difference between data fed via RSS and Data feed by any other dynamic system/web service using XML or other language starts to blur I believe.

Cheers

Chris

[Marcia]

"Imagine a blog updating itself with links and descriptions of affiliate merchant data everyday. How much money do you think you can make?

The problem with that is that there would then be a massive amount of duplicate content being generated that could easily run into filters and hurt traffic long term.

Chris' idea is a sound one

pick up and grab a normal datafeed, storing the data locally so that the pages are generated before hand, and not using a Java Script or other 'on the fly systems' .

That way text can be customized before going online and avoid massive duplicate content problems.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hey Chris, great to see you over here. Thanks for coming by!

Good points Marcia and thanks for the reminder to affiliates about duplicate content. Important point to re-inforce, in any conversion about datafeeds for those that may not know.

"Imagine a blog updating itself with links and descriptions of affiliate merchant data everyday. How much money do you think you can make?

That was a quote from a site selling DF to RSS conversion software, not me BTW.

Actually I assume one of the reasons affiliates want an easy way to display DF on blogs is to help get around the dup penalites by displaying other unique auto updating content along with the feed. Not saying this will necessarily accomplish that goal, but I have seen affiliates discussing it on some forums.

[Bonz]

Like David, I'm having a hard time grasping why people would want product data in RSS format, at least not the product data in the quantities that I'm used to dealing with in datafeeds and such.

RSS is designed to deliver URLs and short descriptions of what's NEW, like news articles. RSS newsreaders use the short list they retrieve in RSS format and figure out what's new.

Sure you could stuff product information into RSS format, but what data will people subscribe to? An entire product catalog of hundreds or thousands of products isn't very useful as RSS data. Are people looking to subscribe to specific product search criteria to get a subset of products, like you can do on MSN search and get search results via RSS? e.g., give me an RSS feed for books about XML.

OK, thinking through this, I guess people probably don't care so much what's "new" as long as there is a handful of targeted products delivered in RSS format that they can insert into a webpage using server-side RSS processing tools. If the products change, fine. if not, that's ok too.

[AMWSO]

I see it as being more useful in the same way that people use Amazon links and Google Adsense, targeted filler for a page. However that raises the question that if "targeted filler" is what is wanted then surely an Amazon style web service is the better solution than an RSS product feed.

Or better yet maybe google can release a private label version of AdSense for merchants and that would fill the niche rather nicely. Site owners would then select the adsense based no only on keywords but also by merchant.

Cheers

Chris

[toprank]

Thanks for pointing me to this thread, Bonz.

I have a few retail clients now testing RSS feeds of specialized product offers for consumers that change daily. They realize the market is still very new but it will be interesting to see what metrics we can get out of it for refinement.

However, the notion of subscribing to a larger data set does pose problems. Offering a keyword query based feed might be useful for consumers and for syndication to affiliates.

An interesting application of RSS feeds for affiliates is offered by ClickBank RSS Feeds. You can select product categories to generate the feeds and add your affilate id to earn commissions. Admittedly, I have not signed up for it to test yet, but plan on checking it out.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

HI Bonz and another thanks for adding this link to the other thread so toprank could find it.

Like I said earlier, I dont see affiliates wanting to syndicate the content out to customers as a primary app. At least not yet. Just more as an easy way to add relevant product links to blogs to try to get consumers to buy.

I even have one affiliate who wrote an app to add datafeeds to his site PURELY as content and backfill to help him generate more Adsense revenue. Suddenly he started getting commission checks from the datafeed links, and was totally surprised. Duh. Now he is flipping his strategy to feature the feeds 1st.

buyitbomb.comreally has some compelling sales copy that would appeal to the affiliates I'm talking to. I would just like to personally talk to someone who has tried it to see if it's really that good and how easy it is before I recommend it. Actually, I'm intrigued enough with what I see, I'd be tempted to buy it and try it if I had any spare time to goof around or one iota of programming skills. But alas I have neither.

<<edited to add>>
Thanks topRank I had seen that Clickbank RSS app and that's similar to what I'm looking for except for use with any datafeed. That's the tricky part because there is not a universal feed format. Chris AMWSO has a datafeed cleaner that may help with that part though.

[Bonz]

Originally Posted by 5starAffiliatePrograms

Just more as an easy way to add relevant product links to blogs to try to get consumers to buy.

Well sure, that's a no-brainer. Relevent products delivered real-time to the right page at the right time. (Sounds like Adsense meets product data, eh?).

Your aff who wrote the app to deliver products to his content is doing something himself with a giant list of products to somehow pick the relevent ones. Sounds like a good strategy.

My point is large quantities of data like datafeeds doesn't really fit with RSS and what it was designed for, unless you can winnow the product list down to something very small.

There's all this talk of delivering products via RSS, just no talk about what's going to be IN them. It can't be 10,000 products like a datafeed.

Maybe this is just a case of when all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If you ARE going to deliver products via RSS (nothing wrong with that), that's easy. An RSS feed can be set up in minutes. But what's not so simple is that you are going to somehow have to decide which are the best few products to present. That's not an easy thing to do well.

You could just leave it up to the affiliate and allow them to specify some keywords, a category, a price range, new specials, etc. etc., that they get in their own custom feed.