DataFeed Import the easy way

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

DataFeed Import the easy way

By Marketingfan.com Internet Markting Blog

Last week Stefan Everaet, the owner of Niche Content Packages (a top quality PLR content provider), released a new site building tool called DataFeedR which promises the painless creation
of datafeed driven sites based on Wordpress.

Well – thin affiliates sites – (as Matt Cutts calles them), driven from a database that was replicated 1000s of times over the whole web were killed years ago by Google’s duplicate content filter – back in 2005 or so. The idea of DataFeedR is bascially the same – import a generally available database into your wordpress, and manage it from there… but…

DataFeed Sites a’la 2008

The improved concept of filling up Google’s index with product descriptions and images from big vendors here is the augmentation with content written by yourself, your writer or maybe your users (i.e. blog comments). Of course the fine line between success and failure here is HOW you do that job… imported the datafeed and leaving it as is would probably be just a waste of money…

DataFeed Pre Processing

One major feature of DataFeedR is the possibility of creating a selective mix of products from multiple merchants and even affiliate networks (big ones like CJ, LinkShare and ShareAsale are supported). One word on the datafeeds: it IS required that a datafeed is PRE-processed by DataFeedR before you can actually blend and download it for you own use. That means whenever you come across some niche, you have to tell Stefan first. This means two things – first they check if that feed is really (technically and semantically) usable. This might take some time, but in the end you save some work for yourself. But second this means that you expose this feed to other users, and if that is very narrow niche that you just discovered or want to test with, that might be something you do not want to do.

But at least you get Stefan to sort our and clean up the merchant’s datafeed mess for you and provide you a quality download. And judging from the quality of his content packages those feeds must be killer quality.

And on the other hand, assuming that you have some funky programmer’s inhouse, you could still builld your own converter tools for feeding into this plugin and then use it “only” as a data management tool and forget about Stefan’s feed processing service at DataFeedR.

I mailed Stefan about the selection of merchants supported currently and got confirmed that not all CJ and Shareasale and Linkshare merchants are yet available but several times a week they add more merchants to Datafeedr. As Commission Junction (CJ) has around 1000 merchants with datafeeds at this moment they focus only on those with good network earnings (EPC) and which are already several years in the network (and this is another pre-processing work done for you).

Unfortunately there is no converter tool available to use datafeeds other than the ones included in Datafeedr. But if you want specific merchants just let Stefan as mentioned above. I guess a full documentation of the DataFeedR import format is the missing link we need here and will ask Stefan about it.

Merchant’s supported so far

Stefan made some quick screenshots of merchants supported currently here and here and here

DataFeedR’s price

The price tag of $97 monthly recurring for DataFeedR is not cheap.
In fact it’s a pretty hefty price for a word press plugin.

But what you get for this is a rock-solid data feed management solution with attached data pre-processing services I’ve yet to find. And it supports Wordpress 2.2-2.3 AS WELL AS the new 2.5.x

Other features

Support Forum – the young forum is there – it’s up to Stefan and his team how he lives up to our expectations

Update only parts of products – obviously you need to rewrite and optimize the product descriptions, so when you update your product list, the following values are updated with new product information: Affiliate Link (URL to the network), Price, Image URL, Thumbnail URL - This means that when you have changed product descriptions and product names these changes will NOT be overwritten by uploading a new datafeed version. But you can customize that behavious as explained in the forum

Embed products within your blog posts – you can add multiple products to your WordPress Posts or Pages – check this out

I’ll keep you posted about DataFeedR and comparable products (which all seem to suck compared to DataFeedR) and my experiences with them. Some impressive features that are announced to be here soon are