Integrating RSS With Affiliate Marketing: The Next Big Thing?

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In light of the recent changes Google has made to its AdWords program, affiliates are scrambling to find ways to build websites in a search engine-friendly and customer-centric manner. Moreover, because online shoppers are now savvier than ever, affiliate marketers must use extreme precision when merchandising their pages and presenting information.

For example, someone in the market for a digital camera no longer wants to encounter an affiliate page linking to 20 electronics different merchants. Rather, this customer hopes to find a site that displays reviews of different types of cameras on the market, lists different camera features and compares pricing. When an affiliate arms a potential customer with an arsenal of valuable information, closing the sale becomes much easier.

Theoretically, building a page of this magnitude sounds easy. In reality, finding access to the wealth of information needed to create such a site can be a daunting task. After all, merchants provide a limited amount of information through their feeds. Merchant data feed content is widely available to thousands of affiliates, so site differentiation becomes an issue.

Luckily, there are thousands of experts on the Web that willingly offer merchandise-specific knowledge and opinions via RSS feeds.

Defining RSS

In general terms, RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Syndication is defined as the supplying of content for reuse and integration with other content. The most common examples of syndication can be found in newspapers, where AP newswires, columns, comics, horoscopes and weather are often syndicated content. All of this information and more is now readily available through syndication over the Internet.

Under the umbrella of the Internet, today's RSS is offered through a new open-ended syndication model. RSS users make periodic calls to a database, which is much less obtrusive. In Web developer speak, the RSS acronym is now commonly defined as rich site summary. Virtually every news website, forum and weblog uses RSS to syndicate its content. More importantly, much of the online content syndicated via RSS is free.

Free content is potentially great news for affiliates, who have seen their margins/conversions shrink due to following online marketing climate changes:

- Merchants' non-trademark bidding policies
- Fortune 500 companies with big branding budgets driving up PPC pricing
- Google AdWords Policy

These changes hurt affiliates because they make affiliate sites harder to locate. However, RSS gives affiliates the chance to build unbiased, content-heavy e-commerce sites, which should help foster customer loyalty and earn high SEO rankings. To access this content, affiliates will need to build an RSS reader into their database. Once an affiliate has developed a system to subscribe to one RSS channel, he/she can subscribe to thousands of unique channels.

Free RSS readers are offered through FireFox.com, Pluck.com and FeedDemon.com.

A New Breed of Affiliates

The emerging popularity of RSS technology will help build a new breed of affiliates in 2005. Currently, the majority of RSS subscribers use the technology as a means to pull news and content. A new "My Yahoo" feature enables consumers to build the perfect home page with news content from many of the Web's top sites (Craigslist.com, Wired News, New York Times News, etc.). For the most part, e-commerce information, such as top sellers and products new to a site, is largely unattainable through RSS.

Expect large e-tailers to access this emerging distribution channel and syndicate RSS feeds of their own. When this happens, affiliates will be able to mix and match "Consumer Electronics Deals of the Day" from Overstock.com, for example, with a product review RSS feed from Engadget.com. When affiliates take these two pieces of information, marry them and then add an affiliate tool such as a coupon or a percentage-off discount, the consumer is looking at a very compelling offer. Merchandising of this sort should increase conversions and bring affiliate marketing to a new level.

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