From the 5 Star Blog:
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliat...-msn-shopping/
MSN Shopping Beta now features user-driven RSS feeds. I think it's a first for shopping portals. Merchants need to start offering dynamically customizable RSS product feeds for affiliates. NOT for consumer use, but as an easy way to give product content to all the affiliates that have blogs, but may not know how do datafeed programming.
Check out MSN Shopping. Here is a search that I ran for digital cameras priced between $320 and $460.
http://shopping.msn.com/results/shp/...axPrice=459.99 Now picture this RSS product feed being offered by a merchant. Affiliates could sort products based on price, brand name, most popular or highest user ratings. Pick the sort option you want to see, then go to the bottom of the MSN page above and click the XML button. Voila - there's your RSS feed!
Even though I promote the use of datafeeds, have published articles about the benefits, have a directory of FREE datafeeds at http://www.5staraffiliateprograms.co...datafeeds.html, offered by my clients and some even call me the datafeed QUEEN - I couldn't program a datafeed to save my life! BUT I whipped up this digital camera page,http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliat...igital-cameras in less than a minute and added it to my WordPress blog. I guarantee I will get good traffic to this page. The only thing missing is affiliate links - so I won't make any money, but the merchant would program a place for the affiliate ID to go into each link. Pictures are also missing in the MSN feed but could be added to merchant feeds. This page, even without pics has great spider food - but pics would help buyer click-through.
NOTE: If I were an affiliate, I would not even offer an RSS link on my site for consumers except maybe for products that appeal to high-tech consumers that know what RSS feeds are. But in general, I see this just as a fast easy way for affiliates to add product content to pages, not to offer RSS to consumers.
I am working with a couple of companies that already have or are developing tools turn a straight datafeeds into an RSS feed, for affiliates to use with any product datafeed, even if the merchant does not offer RSS yet. But merchants need to get on the ball with this option and start offering it. The only merchants I am aware of that are really starting to use RSS is AMWSO and X10.
I brought this issue up at Affiliate Summit and have discussed it at several forums. Why am I so HOT on RSS product feeds for affiliates??? If I can build a page full of products in less than 1 minute - non-techy that I am - ANY AFFILIATE CAN!!! In fact with tools like
RSS Equalizer - affiliates that don't even have blogs can add RSS feeds to existing HTML pages, without any programming at all. Check out
http://www.5staraffiliateprograms.co...directory.html and go to bottom of this HTML page to see where I added the ThreadWatch feed to the page with RSS Equalizer, for spider food. It could just as easily be an affiliate HTML content page about cameras with the digital camera feed I pulled from MSN. This type of RSS datafeed can be added to a page with RSS Equalizer in less than 10 seconds!
If CJ, Shareasale and other networks would start offering RSS product feeds, I truly think it could revolutionize the industry and everyone would make more sales - affiliates and merchants alike!
Know any merchants that offer RSS feeds? Are you aware of any tools that convert standard affiliate datafeeds to RSS?