Inside Look at WordPress Data Feed Import Script
March 23, 2007 – 3:34 pmSince practically my first day in affiliate marketing, I was always fascinated with data feed driven websites. Unfortunately without good knowledge of MySQL and PHP, I had to rely in the most part on service like GoldenCan or DataFeedFile. Using these data feed services is very easy and you can create websites to feature hundreds of products in short time. The downside of using these services is that even if you chose to feature a single category for a single merchant, you are likely to end up with a website that will have hundreds of pages. This can cause a big delay for your site to be listed in the search engines, and even if you get lucky, big part of your website may end up in Google’s so called “Supplemental Results”. Another downside is that these data feed solutions do not give you freedom to modify your data and your website will contain duplicate content found on hundreds of other affiliate websites.
WordPress Data Feed Import Script.
After discovering WordPress I realized that it can be used as a building tool for your affiliate websites. But it can take long time to build larger websites if you were to enter each post manually. With WordPress Data Feed Import you can build large sites in short time using data feeds from your merchants and and instead of constantly writing content you can dedicate some time to promote your website, or even work on multiple websites at the same time.
The script imports the product information such as product name, description, price along with your affiliate link and creates a post for each product, while giving you control if you want all your products to appear at once (I highly discourage this option) or space them to appear on your site over certain period of time. In the next few steps I will show you have I imported my first data feed with this script.
Preparing Your Datafeed for Import.
After your successfully installed the script, running it will bring you to the following window:
Before proceeding you have to make sure that your data feed file is in the “import” directory. Also this would be a good time to make sure that you datafeed’s fields correspond to the fields in “conent.txt”. In my case I had to change following fields ProductName>>Title, SmallImgUrl>>Image, ProductLink>>Link. This is an important step and you should take some time to set it right. Also this is a good opportunity to work on the description fields to modify your content and make it unique. You will be surprised how one sentence can set you apart. In my first import I took shortcut by adding few words in the “content.txt” file:
While this data feed contained only golf clubs, I simply added “Drive your ball home with” before %title%. Disadvantage of this approach is that this sentence will appear in every single post and if you have more than just one category of products in your data feed this will not work well.
In the first image you see that I have set my posts to appear on the website every 3 hours. This is probably one of the best features Datafeed Import Script comes with. What it does is it schedules your posts and if you log into your WordPress Dashboard you will see all the scheduled posts:
So now that WordPress is working for you you can spend more time building incoming links to your website or optimizing your PPC campaigns or start importing another data feed.
In my first attempt I have imported data feed from Overstock and this particular data feed features only golf clubs. Here is an example how the each individual post will look like:
Using WordPress Data Feed Import Script is much easier than I thought it would be. Once you become more familiar with it’s features you can create websites in minutes.
WordPress Data Feed Script (aff link).
Tags: Affiliate Marketing
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It's difficult to rank well with a datafeed that hundreds of other affiliates are using. I found it difficult get the "datafeed" websites to rank well.
But this particular is as SEO friendly as any WordPress powered blog.
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It has been a while since I used this script. Way before WP 2.3.x. To be honest I was under impression that this script will be discontinued. In the past Teli was very good with the support. Sorry.
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The title of the post is the number itself - for example '3481'. When you click on the post, the URL looks like this
http://top40musicsites.com/category/3481/
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Are the numbers become what we now the "title" of the post or are they only show as part of the URL?
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Thx.
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Btw thank for the article
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One think you should consider is to slightly modify the datafeed. You can do wonders with excel or other spreadsheet... A sentence or two can make a huge difference.
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I had my eye on this software since it was released but could not afford it at the time. I am planing to do some screencasts about it in the future.
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I think I will check this out in due time. Thanks for the "heads up"
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