Affiliate Stores

In starting this site, I said that I aim to cover all affiliate store tools available.

There is a relatively new kid in the block now in Datafeed Studio.

At the time of writing this post, I have been unable to get it to run in my Linux/Apache live environment, which the developer has suggested is down to my host environment.

There is an evaluation version available which is limited to two feeds. The feature list from the developer is as follows :

Datafeed Studio converts your merchant datafeeds into dynamic money-making websites and comes with out of the box support for rapid building of the following types of affiliate based web site:

1. Niche Online Stores Example
2. Price Compare Sites Example
3. Product Price Compare Pages (Ideal for PPC) Example

User Generated Content

In true Web 2.0 fashion, Datafeed Studio themes can allow the user to participate on your web site by providing reviews of products.

These are held in a staging area for you to moderate, and approve before publication. User reviews are great as they give your site free user-generated content, which Google and other search engines will lap up!

Amazon Support

Want Amazon products on your site? Unable to get an Amazon datafeed?

Datafeed Studio has the solution with its built-in support for accessing the Amazon product database (from any country). To use this feature you will need to sign-up with the relevant Amazon Web Service program for your locality (free) to get your Amazon Web Service account credentials.

Amazon is a great merchant for converting clicks into sales so it is highly recommended that you activate this feature. Once enabled you can search Amazon’s huge product database (including those provided by Third Parties) and add the products you want to your Datafeed Studio database. What’s more, Datafeed Studio can be configured to automatically keep the product details (price, description, availability, etc.) synchronised with Amazon’s database.

Create Niche Online Stores, Price Compare Sites and More!

Unlike other affiliate solutions, Datafeed Studio is not limited to a single type of affiliate site, and can generate online stores, price compare sites and highly profitable PPC landing pages at a push of a button.

Experiment with the best choice of money-making site for you niche (and let us all know about your successes in the Datafeed Studio Discussion Forum!)

Themes

Datafeed Studio comes with a selection of user customisable themes to help you create great looking affiliate websites. These act as a great starting point for your own customisation and imagination.

All the presentation files used by Datafeed Studio are freely editable either using the built-in theme editor, or as they are just normal files stored on the web server, via your favourite editor via FTP or SSH.

Created a great theme or site using Datafeed Studio? Let us know about it and we’ll mention it on the blog or even link to it from this site.

Integrate With Existing Web Sites (including WordPress)

Advanced users might want to use Datafeed Studio as an affiliate product database and reference selected products from other blog or CMS publishing systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.

Datafeed Studio makes this possible by allowing you access to the same functions that native Datafeed Studio templates use from your other web sites.

See integrating Datafeed Studio with WordPress to understand how little effort is required.

Automated Refresh of Datafeeds

Datafeed Studio comes with a set of PHP command-line scripts that enable you to automate the download and import of datafeed products into your database (e.g. via cron).

Don’t worry - if your not a fan of the command-line, you can manually refresh a particular feed, or all feeds at once, with just one click from the Datafeed Studio administration interface.

Master your Products

When you have thousands of products at your fingertips, you need to gain some control over them. Datafeed Studio comes with a powerful search tool that allows you to quickly find the products of interest to you.

What’s more - with Datafeed Studio you can create special categories of products (great for online stores) either by manually allocating them from the administration interface, or creating dynamic categories that will automatically list all products matching the criteria you specify (e.g. all products that match the word ‘TomTom’).

In addition, you can override almost all the product information that is provided in the datafeed about a product, including it’s name, description, URL for SEO purposes, etc. Datafeed Studio even remembers this information when you update your datafeeds, so you never lose your valuable unique content about products, and can continue to create great value added affiliate sites that will be appreciated by your site visitors.

Incidentally, the support I received from the developer was excellent in trying to resolve the problem, even logging in to my host to double-check all the configuration and the installation. Unfortunately he was defeated by my host where it appears that the mysql server version required updating to eliminate bugs that are causing my install to fail.

The product relies upon an Apache environment (and the newer SQLi libraries) and is unsuitable for Windows IIS hosts. Until such times as my host upgrades and I can get a working environment to show you, please feel free to leave your own comments and views on the product and showcase your Datafeed Studio sites/pages.