Hey Mo, thanks for pointing to my resources to data feeds.
I read the original post and have to say that
my resources will not help Charlie very much with his
problems with RSS2Blog and DatafeedtoRSS. You might noticed that I do not refer to those services at all.
That is by choice and not by accident because frankly, I fail to see their value.
Just creating blog posts from data feeds sounds to me not much better than somebody who uses blog feeds to republish them without providing additional information or any other type value. I would also be careful with that. Affiliates who remember Google's infamous "
Florida Update" in 2003 will know what I am talking about. Affiliates were able to cash in via using data feeds and tools like web-merge to create virtually a new site with hundreds or thousands of pages on a single day. This income dried up virtually overnight, when Google's algorithm update, dubbed "Florida" was making those sites disappear from their index.
I have not seen good examples of the use of the mentioned tools. The examples I saw so far do nothing else than affiliates did up to 2003, with the only difference that they are using blogs today instead of static HTML websites. The obviously missing feature of allowing feed updates without duplication of existing content shows that those tools were not designed for that. I would be happy to get proven wrong by providing examples where those tools are used in a good way and be more efficient doing that compared to other tools out there that do not convert data feeds to RSS.
RSS itself is already limiting and an ill fit for data feeds. Useful information, such as the price, manufacturer or attributes like color and size etc. must be squeezed into the description element of the RSS feed, because no elements exist for those things in RSS.
Working with raw data feeds yourself is not easy. There are several problem with this that make things more complicated than they already are by nature (its an interface and interfaces are not simple, unless they are standardized). For example does no standard exist for feeds. They come in all shapes and sizes. Add to that, that most merchants don't know much about data feeds and make basic errors that causes big problems for you if you don't check the data feed integrity every time you pull them. The networks are in general no different, their data feed technology did not improve much over the last 5 years. If you create something of value with the feeds, you can't get around the need to update them frequently. How frequently that is, really depends on the merchants, some update their products daily, some only once or twice a year and everything in between.
My resources will help you with that.
Affiliate Product Data Feeds Resources, Affiliate Network Services Documentations, Guides and Articles
This page links to the relevant stuff, from general guides to very specific things like network data feed structures and scripts/source code how to pull them into your database for processing.
If you promote individual products and blog about them for example, you will not update them of course, but you also have no need for data feeds to do that.
Because networks and merchants failed both,
3rd party vendors popped up to provide non-tech savvy affiliates with tools that make sense, like pulling individual products out of a product catalog (if you ever tried that at CJ for example, you will know why there was a need for this), but also dynamic product creatives that are simply a few lines of javascript with some parameters you can define to determine the types of products to show and the layout. The actual product data are being pulled from the vendor every time the page on your site gets loaded and the vendor worries about keeping the feeds information of each supported merchant up to date.
You can find a number of services that are available for that here.
I don't have a favorite. Each of them is slightly different than the other. MY advice is to check them all out and pick the one that works best for your needs.
Affiliate Product Data Feeds Resources, Affiliate Network Services Documentations, Guides and Articles
Another option is for developers who do not want to deal with the nightmare of updating data feeds themselves and kicking a huge amount of data around that can cause your site to crash and render unusable if you don't watch what the heck you got send from the merchant with the new feed. I am talking about
APIs or Web Services here. Amazon and eBay have APIs for ages, networks more the most part don't. CJ launched their web services beta last fall, which is still in beta today for good reasons. A small network that allows access to product data on the fly via an interface is AvantLink. After that are the solutions, if any exists at all more like a workaround than a real help. This includes real-time data feeds. Some APIs (the web services versions of them) use XML. I have a separate resources page just for web services here.
Web Services Development Resources, Articles, Tutorials and Books for Developers
There are other great tools, services and resources out there that have APIs and are useful in combination with product APIs. You can find a bunch of them at the following page, which also refers to resources where you can find out about the vast number of available APIs from the zillions of Web 2.0 services out there who (for the most part) embrace the use of standardized APIs, like SOAP/WSDL, XML-RPC, SAX and other types of web services.
Website Development Resources, APIs and Web Services, XML, Ajax, .NET, PHP
Okay, Wrapping Up /
Sorry for the long post and my rambling, but I guess it wanted out and ReveNews is still in the process of being upgraded, so no blogging about affiliate stuff for me right now
.
I hope that you find the information useful and again, if anybody can point me to examples where those Data feed to RSS and/or to Blog tools where used in a good way that will not be considered spam or "little value adding affiliate sites" and kicked out of search engines and other places eventually, where it isn't already the case today, I am all ear and willing to adjust my attitude towards them.
Cheers and happy Labor Day.