How to Build a 1,000-Page Content Site in Mere Seconds!
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!
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:
Rosalind's Candy Crate Site (http://rosalinds.com/CandyCrate/)
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.
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.