Datafeeds…I Think I’m Getting It!
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Apart from eating loads of chocolate over the Easter weekend, I’ve also been getting into this datafeed malarky!
It seems that it’s the buzz word nowadays if you’re into affiliate marketing and while there seems to be several programs out there which do the donkey work when it comes to providing datafeed content to your website, I thought I’d have a go myself.
After all we all want plenty of fresh new content for our websites for those greedy little search engine spiders!
Well the problem seems to be that many of the software products out there give a line of javascript code or an Iframe for your datafeed info. Unfortunately Google and the like can’t see this sort of stuff so they ignore it. No, if it’s fresh content for SEO then the goodies have got to be able to be seen by those spiders and that means good old mark-up pages.
Well about five days later and many wasted hours I think I’ve cracked how to do it. Putting aside the fact that datafeeds don’t only come in one format, I have found out with my basic PHP skills how to put the datafeed into a database and then out again on to a good old html page. Now I’ve just got to make the page look nice.
Before I embarked on this however I downloaded a free program from www.affilistore.com, a program where you can set up an affiliate based store for nothing. Although I found it excellent in principle I was too lazy to get the instructions and learn how to use it properly. However I came across a great instructional video over at a guy called Stephen Pratley’s blog, in which he explains all in detail. Check it out here, http://www.stephenpratley.com/building-an-affilistore-travel-site-4-building-the-site. It’s really good.
As for me I probably won’t be using affilistore partly because I’m too tight to pay out for the license to have the copyright message removed (which is optional), but mainly because I like to do these things myself.
But for anyone else who doesn’t want the hours of frustration and self inflicted head pain in doing this, I think affilistore is great.
