Hello fellow Niche Marketers!
Let's talk a little bit about Datafeeds today and how you can incorporate them into your strategy for building niche websites.
The day I finally embraced datafeeds is the day that part of my business became much, much easier. AND.. I was able to do much more including getting more traffic!
..and not just any 'ol traffic. Targeted traffic!
There is no better visitor than those that have entered into a search box a brand name or product description of some kind and then landing on a page with that exact product they were looking for..
What is a Datafeed?
Well, to put it simply, a merchant essentially creates a simple text/csv file we can use that contains information about all their products. It's formatted so we can simply import the file and populate our websites in seconds.
How that's done varies. It depends on what solution you are using.
Personally the two Content Management Systems I use in conjunction with datafeeds are Joomla and Wordpress. Each has a set of plugins to help import and manage datafeeds and products. (see below)
So let's say a merchant has a 1000 products in their online store. What they'll do is create this file for their affiliates (those promoting their products) which allows the affiliate to build niche stores of their products..
..the affiliate then promotes that store, visitors follow the affiliate links and hopefully sends traffic to the merchant that converts!
The affiliate doesn't necessarily have to use the entire feed. Often, and I do this with most of my feeds, we have ways to filter the feed to choose the categories of products that we want to display.
If you have a niche website, you might only be focused on a small category of products for that merchant. You don't want to import unrelated products to your site!
That's not where it ends though..
Datafeeds help you populate your store, but it doesn't end there. It's just a solution to help you display relevant product descriptions, thumbnails, embed affiliate links automatically etc..
You still want to provide further content on your website in the form of articles and other content. You can still take those product store descriptions and expand them. Most datafeed solutions should allow you to modify what you imported.
You also want to build in a useful purpose for your website. This can be done through making the site interactive and providing functionality that helps the visitor in some way -- help in which they may not get from the merchant's site.
Make your niche website special!
The key to a successful niche website is to make the stop worthwhile.
If you can't say the visitor wouldn't be just as well off going straight to the merchant's site, you are not providing enough value. What can you offer that is different and helpful beyond just having a store of products?
Use datafeeds and automate that side of your business..
Again, it's not the end all be all solution. Don't expect to just throw up a product feed and be done. Anyone can do that.. and you'll end up just competing against other sites that do that; and duplicate content.
But use it to help speed up the process of importing products to your site and help you manage and keep your site up to date and fresh.
-Matt Levenhagen
My #1 Datafeed Recommendation for Wordpress >> Datafeedr Niche Web Stores
They have a great plugin for Wordpress; easy to set up and use!
For Joomla - Personally I use a component called VM Shop Builder in conjunction with VirtueMart. But I would not recommend that combination for the beginner.. it's a real bear to configure. Huge flexibility and a ton of features.. works great once it's set up, but there's a learning curve. ;)
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