Now that I’ve created a test Datafeedr affiliate store in one of my WordPress blogs, and I have one product per day “dripping” to my home page as a blog post, and the navigation has been added to my sidebar, I’m trying to make sure that I have some original content everywhere I can – in addition to making the store a seamless part of my blog, and a value add for my readers as well. The last thing I want to do is piss off google, or make my site so spammy that users just end up leaving quickly. There are a couple different ways to add value to both the affiliate store, and to posts as well.

This post is part of the Series How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress. Check out the previous posts to see how we arrived at this point with our WordPress affiliate store.

Spice Up Your Dripped Posts

I think that the option to create posts from your affiliate store an timed intervals is great, but you are surely treading on thin water here in many regards. First of all – all the products in your affiliate store come from a datafeed, where the titles and product descriptions aren’t unique to you. Anyone that uses that feed, and possibly the original merchant store as well – uses the exact same product title and description. Google won’t throw you out just for that, unless of course ALL your blog content is dripped posts, and you’re dripping like dozens per day to try and attract traffic.

An affiliate store makes a great addition to any blog, but it shouldn’t be the crux of it. You should be rewriting the posts as they are dripped to actually benefit your blog. Think of dripped posts as “automatic blog ideas”. Then, change the title, the permalink maybe even, write some original content – and then add other things that might add value or monetize the post further. I don’t mind leaving the original description content, as long as I have some kind of lead in for it using my own original content. If you don’t know what to write – you can always do some searches for the product and read reviews about it to become more knowledgeable. In one of the next few posts I’ll show you a great way to quickly get up to speed on a product for a post.

If you have any doubt that just dripping posts “as-is” to your blog a good idea, just try it. I had 4 days where I was busy and content auto-posted to my blog homepage. Each and every day my traffic went down about 15-20%. In addition none of the incoming keyword phrases were related to those posts. All the days I used re-written and spiced up dripped posts I had no change in traffic at all.

eBay Auctions

If you already have a plugin to quickly add eBay auctions to your blog, how easy is it to just add the tag and some keywords to the bottom of each of these posts to add a few eBay auctions? It wouldn’t hurt to write a blurb above it about finding “new and use deals on xx on eBay”. I use BayRSS WordPress eBay Affiliate plugin to add auctions to my posts on nearly all my blogs.

YouTube Videos

YouTube videos are a GREAT way to keep your visitors attention – AND they can be a great source of product info. Especially if you can get a video of someone actually using your product. The YouTube video is easy to add, just copy and paste the embed code. Try to write about the video for some additional original content… “here a video of someone using ginsu knives to saw aluminum cans in half – don’t you wish you could do that?”

Amazon Widgets

Amazon has virtually every product on the planet (with reviews). They have a ton of widgets in HTML, flash, javascript, iframes, and more. You can add images, text links, widgets that show different products everytime, and Amazon is famous for: BOOKS! I mean, if you show a fancy food chopper blender thingie, a YouTube video of it in action, some eBay auctions of it, why not throw some cookbook links at the end from Amazon? It gives you the chance to write EVEN MORE original content about why you like this or that cookbook – or a recipe that you made.

I’ve been sending in little “wish list items” to DatafeedR staff regarding things that I believe would make my affiliate store (and their service) even better. One of those would be to actually drip posts to a queue (or just to “review” status). This way you could rewrite them before they were even published. Automation is great, but the best results usually require some kind of manual intervention and review! I’m sure that even if you don’t use DatafeedR to build an affiliate store in your WordPress blog, that you’ve done lots of things to extra-monetize or spice up your blog posts. What were they? Tell us in comments below…

**UPDATE**

After a couple comments it’s clear that I need to show you a little example of what I meant in this post rounding up the points I made.

Here’s an example of what a datafeedr “dripped post” looks like on one of my blogs:

datafeedr dripped post

I wanted you to see this example first because it’s what datafeedr auto-published for me without any intervention on my part. Well, I did change both the title and the permalink before I took the screenshot (I forgot). The title was something like “Modulus Q5 5-String Bass Bubinga Top Electric Guitar New” or something like that. On my blog Guitar Review, one new post drips from the datafeedR store to my homepage at 9pm each night. The next day sometime, I change the title to something with just a few keywords, and I change the permalink to the same thing.

Now I know somebody out there is saying “won’t that screw up your indexed pages in the search engines?” Let me tell you, google’s index is so minty fresh that it’s just fine. I check this morning and here’s my proof:

datafeedr google results

I had to change 2 posts today since I slacked off the last few days – and when I checked google a half hour later the change to both the permalink and the title had already been indexed and updated in SERP’s. I’ve done this check before and seen the update in as little as 5 minutes. THAT is the power of using a blog for an affiliate store!

Now then – here’s what the updated post looks like after I enhanced and monetized it further:

datafeedr enhanced dripped product blog post

See the difference? In the original datafeedr dripped post I got a (very long) title and permalink, and the standard description from the merchant’s site. This isn’t going to get me very good SERP indexing or organic results at all. Sure, you could build an entire affiliate store based only raw datafeed posts dripped to the homepage, and then just do an adword campaign against it to generate sales and conversions. But if you can get each and every dripped page indexed well for additional long-tail keywords, why not? If you drip a post or two per day, and enhance them – once you get between 50-100 you will be fueling your affiliate store with all kinds of organic traffic!