This tutorial shows how to create an affiliate store in 5 minutes from a data feed. This is an incredibly flexible alternative to BANS, PHPBay, BayRSS, Build a Niche Store, Amazon widgets, or anything else out there. I use ALL the things I just mentioned, but this is something new, something FREE, and something very, very customizable…
I’m about to show you something incredible that’s been under your (and my) nose all this time and you didn’t even know it. If you’ve been an eBay affiliate, or promoted affiliate programs through Commission Junction, ShareASale, or LinkShare you know how difficult it can be to link to individual products, create a landing page, or get links. Nobody wants to promote a banner anymore, as bloggers and niche marketers we need to promote “products”. It’s very frustrating knowing that a good merchant has thousands and thousands of quality products and you can’t directly link to them at all.
There is a solution, and it’s very, very easy to do – and it’s been under your nose all this time. You can have an entire affiliate store online in about 5 minutes, containing each and every product a merchant has. You can do it very little knowledge of code (some HTML helps), and you don’t need any special blogging software or plugin even. Your store will be completely searchable and all results will come up on your page within your domain – no iframes or crazy stuff. It will even be completely searchable (or not) if you want it to be by search engine spiders. I am shocked that the way to do this isn’t available directly through CJ, ShareASale, or LinkShare themselves.
All the big merchants (and some of the smaller ones) have a “data feed”. It’s a text file (usually XML or CSV) containing all the details of every product they sell. It has the titles, names, links, and descriptions of all products in their database. If you were a web programmer, you could request this data feed and build an incredible online store with it, inserting your affiliate ID in all the links. But you’re probably not a programmer…
Guess what – there’s a free service you can use where you won’t need a programmer. It cost nothing, and probably never will. I’m talking about GoldenCAN.com. Sign up and get an account RIGHT NOW! What happens is, once you have an account you can choose a merchant, enter your affiliate ID, and create an online store feed in seconds. They get every fourth click you generate from the feeds to pay for their expenses, unless you use one of the 30 merchant feeds where they foot the bill, and you get all the traffic. That’s right, if you use one of the 30+ starred feeds, the merchant pays for it so you don’t have to turn over every 4th click (or share any traffic at all). This means this entire service is FREE and cost absolutely nothing to you.
How to Add an Affiliate Data Feed in 5 Minutes
I was AMAZED at how quickly I setup an entire online store. It was so quick and dirty I was shocked, I am not lying – I had my first on online in less than 5 minutes.
First – Find a Merchant:
Choose one of the first 30+ merchants with free feeds.Second – Create a Store:
Just give your store a name, add your affiliate ID from Commission Junction, ShareASale, or LinkShare, and create and enter a unique short identifier of your own to track sales.
Third – Set your Store Properties:
You can modify the categories you want to display within the store (or display everything), you can change the font and color properties, how many items to show on a page, whether you have search displayed, etc.
Fourth – Get your code and past into a simple web page:
You have many choices for inclusion in a web page. One is javascript (which search engines won’t index). If you don’t want your store indexed this is great. If you do – then you can use either PHP for Linux webhosting, or ASP for Windows webhosting. This code takes care of the entire store, including search, navigation, and all products. All you have to do is paste it into a web page (template) that you create which can be as simple or complex as you desire. At very least you should probably have some kind of footer, an intro paragraph of original content, and a footer – with navigation back to your site and a copyright.
Once you’ve created stores, they are listed within your “MyStores” page like this:
You can delete or duplicate your stores from here. This page also tracks how many pageviews and clicks your store(s) have generated. I created 5 different stores so far, and each one has been created in 5 minutes or less – you can view them all for examples if you wish:
eBags Coupons: This was the first one I created, which wasn’t a store, but a coupon page listing all current offers from eBays (updated live). When you create a store you have the ability to create store products, coupons, or search results integration page. I used the javascript option to add these to the page.
Guitar Store: This was the second one I made, and all I did was open a text editor and create a simple HTML file and add one header logo – and I copied and pasted the PHP code from goldenCAN in the middle of the page like this:
Instrument Pro Guitars |Guitar Review
Computer Closeouts
Computer Overstocks
Both of these I used the same basic HTML page, but this time I added a paragraph of original content at the top of the page for each for better indexing.
Refurb LCD HDTV: on this one I made named the PHP file with keywords for better indexing.
If you really thing about it – you could create these affiliate stores from data feeds and make your own custom headers, and footers and treat them like BANS sites. You could write original articles and promote them, monetize them with other ads or adsense, or even include the feed in your blog. Promoting feeds with these data feeds could become a good “free BANS alternative“. And you didn’t know there could be an “alternative to Build a Niche Store” – did you? Let alone completely customizable and completely free!
Hi, great idea. I think I’ll try this one out.
A few remarks and questions:
1) they look ugly, do you need to make them prety yourself or do they provide scripts for that
2) what about traffic. Are you seeing any from search engines?
3) some of you links did not work. but others did.
O.
Olivier’s last blog post..Pay Per Play: make money of every visitor to your site
No – that’s the whole point, I put these test stores up in only 5 minutes. I provided the code for the first example page to show that I only added a header graphic and that was it. Honestly – that’s all you can do in 5 minutes. But like any affiliate store promotion or monetization of your site – you have to work on it.
What GoldenCAN gives you is copy and paste code to get the store content. The page you create is a wrapper around that, and you can use or create whatever kind of template you want for header, footer, sidebar, monetization, etc.
With these feeds you could even build a whole slew of stores on one site from different pages and create a master “store home”.
As far as traffic goes, these are only a few days old – so they won’t be getting any search engine traffic anytime soon. To do that I need to go back and create meta descriptions for each, and then add them to my wordpress sitemap on those sites – and it will get indexed good. Some more original content on those pages couldn’t hurt either. It’s like promoting any other kind of niche site or product.
Which links didn’t work for you? I just tried them all – and the all came up for me.
=
They look great, only problem I see is that you have to sign up through GoldenCan, I’d rather have them just assist with the process (more like a plugin) rather than direct all of my traffic through someone I’ve never heard of. Do you have much experience with GoldenCan?
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More than likely – the reason you haven’t heard of GoldenCAN.com before now is because you have to figure out how to integrate the products in your site yourself. That’s why I wrote a new post showing how to do search result integration with products from GoldenCAN.
They’re not going to assist with the process any more than Amazon or eBay assists you getting their code in your site. There are just too many blogging platforms out there to help everyone with their particular situation. But it’s very easy to copy and paste this code (as I’ve shown) in about any site.
GoldenCAN is a reputable company that now actually been around many years. Here’s a favorable GoldenCAN review from 3 years ago, and another from 2007 that says he’s been using it a few years (and that post is one year old. So there are two examples that this company has been around successfully 3+ years now. I wouldn’t worry about sending them traffic any more than any other affiliate.
I have a lot of trouble getting approved for the affiliate programs as most of them require a working site. I wanted to make a new domain with the stores, like you did, but they do not seem to like this.
I guess you were already an affiliate to some of these site. If not, what is your secret?
Olivier.
I was already an affiliate for all but one – ShareASale. I was approved for that one in just a few hours. Yes, you need some kind of existing site. If I want to sign up for an affiliate for a brand new site, when I apply I just list one of my existing sites to get the account, and then use it for the new one I’m putting up. Don’t you have an existing site of some kind you can use for this?
Yes, but wouldn’t that be lying? =)]
And if they see that the traffic is not from the site you applied for, are they not entitled to refuse payment?
No – not at all. When you signup they just want your “main” url. Online marketers setup new sites all the time, they expect it. In fact, most (like Commission Junction) allow you to add all your URL’s in as you set new ones up for tracking purposes (without further approval).
=)~
Wow, I learned a lot.
And will try to set up some site very soon. I got approved by some of the stores already. They are not in my niche, but that does not really matter. I could try to get some decent SE ranking nevertheless.
Thanks a lot.
JT, man, you are DEEP into some stuff here. I’m, first, shocked to see my FACE peeking out today from Entrecard (thanks!). But your knowledge and attitude about “this game” is commendable.
This is the post I wanted to comment on because I just wrote a software guy this long response because his solution seemed crazy to me, as I was looking at what he sold, BANS and phpbay. I KNEW there had to be a way to do this cheap/free; it just made sense. I’m about to link to this post, because somebody JUST left a comment on the post I referenced right above.
I don’t even know what I want to sell on Ebay yet, but with their new Partner Network I wanted to be able to. Plus I had joined ShareASale for a specific thing this week.
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Interesting! I’ve been a member of GoldenCan.com for several months but never knew what to do with it.
However, I’m now stuck. I want to add php feed code to a wordpress blog but I can’t find a plugin that works that will let me do this. I’ve found a few php plugins but none of them seem to work with the latest version of wordpress.
Do you know of any php plugins that do work?
Thank you,
Rochelle
@Rochelle – try using the popshops.com service. They aggregate every feed from every affiliate service known to man and they now have a WordPress plugin where you can search every feed and add what you want to each post one by one.
About your original question – you asked how you can add the goldencan PHP code and you want a plugin that does this. The only way is by using the PHP Exec plugin which allows you to execute PHP code on your WordPress posts and pages. This is very dangerous. What you should instead do is to create a WordPress template with the code you want, and then create a WordPress page that uses that template. As luck would have it, I wrote a post today about creating a template and add php code for rss feeds, just use that as an example and then instead of adding the rss feed PHP code block, use the goldencan php code.
Hi, I found GoldenCan a few days ago, and added it to my main blog (Groovy Vegetarian) as a page.
But what would be super cool is to have the RSS feed capability. I need to learn how to use this. GoldenCan is an awesome service, you’re right, it is a little known secret. Shhh.
Will look at your other post on GC. Thanxs!
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I am learning so much from your blogs JT. Had never heard of popshops.com; again, thanks.
Just curious about the Php exec plugin. I was advised to use it a few months back for feeds and it went crazy; I had to remove it. What makes it dangerous?
Thanks again for all this valuable stuff you teach!
Kim
I would recommend not to use PHPExec. There’s no reason to if you know how to create a theme template – you can put PHP code there. PHPExec is dangerous because if someone gets posting access to your blog they can use whatever code they want to destroy your site. Also, PHPExec has known conflicts with tons of plugins – AND it slows down blogs.
If we create sites from Data Feeds won’t Google and the other search engines consider that duplicate content?
.-= Phil´s last blog ..New First Act Electric Guitar. =-.
no – not if you add original content to the products and categories
Hi igen!
I’m steel here!
You learn so much!
Don’t you have some kind of ebook we can buy?
After reading your post I checked Golden Can and even though I’m not sure I fully understand everything, I definitely see the potential.
This is a fantastic idea, but my reservation is this. Will this data feed create multi pages that are search engine friendly? If not, how will you drive visitors to your website?
.-= ppo´s last blog ..PPO Insurance and Plans and deductibles =-.
the goal of an affiliate feed is to monetize your site, not to drive traffic.