You wouldn’t know it, but there is a shop on this site.

If you know anything about being an affiliate you probably know that there are datafeeds available from the affiliate centres like RegNow and ShareASale.

The question is, are these feeds any good? What do they look like?

Now I am well aware what is the common sense advice from anybody who has experience as an affiliate. The advice is: don’t expect that you can just paste some code onto your site and instantly have a good-looking, useful shop that people would actually want to visit.

But still, we all have to start from somewhere, so I decided to try out a php feed from RegNow to see what it would look like.

It certainly was easy to implement!

That’s actually why I chose the php feed. There are others available but the php looked like the one that would involve the least work. Other formats include javascript, csv and XML.

I had a specific category of software in mind: all to do with video converting, downloading and converting youtube videos, and a general AV topic. I inserted the appropriate options and categories at installation and let it run.

So if you are interested you can see what that looks like at the installed shop here.

Not too pretty. Here’s why:

1. The method used to identify a specific category of products is not perfect. If you want to ensure that ONLY relevant products are in your datafeed you will need to do some tweaking.

2. I suppose that just about all of the product vendors using an affiliate centre can make their product available for inclusion in automated datafeeds. (I don’t really know how that works: I’m not a vendor.) But, evidently, not all of them are equally conscientious about providing a nice picture, useful product description and a price to be included with the datafeed. So again, if you want your shop to be good-looking you will need to do some editing and tweaking.

Now, about that editing and tweaking. It is not really possible with the php feed. That’s why RegNow also offer the javascript, csv and XML feeds.

I was just too lazy to implement the XML feed, which is the most flexible. (It would involve some learning before it was successfully integrated with the website.)

The php feed from RegNow was very easy to implement and immediately placed nearly 300 more pages on my site here. However, I have noticed that, in a month, nobody has actually visited those pages. Mind you, until today, the pages have no metatags and no external links to them. Also, until I writ this post they had no internal links to them neither. Like I said, it was an experiment.

But this actually contradicts my usual experience, which is that any page will get some visitors in a month.

So that was my experiment. Just shows: on the internet it is much more important to be relevant than to have a lot of pages.

By the way, I don’t mean to be critical of RegNow in any of this. In my experience with them I have no complaints. If I sell some software they send me a cheque.

Next step for me? I suppose if I want to have a big shop I should use the best datafeed - the XML. Then I can edit and tweak until it really is a useful shop.

Another next step? I have not tried out the datafeeds from ShareASale yet. I see from the forums there that some users are happy with their feeds.