In this screencast, I show how you can use SellFire to create an affiliate deals store for your WordPress blog. A “deals store” is a store that only shows products that are heavily discounted. In the example, we create a store that only contains products that are at least 25% off their list price. However, you can set the discount percentage to whatever you like.

The video demonstrates using the AutoSearch feature to automatically populate a store with products. This allows you to ensure that you always have all of the products that are current being discounted. You won’t have to worry about removing products from your store when the affiliate data feed updates and they are no longer on sale. On the other hand, it also means you can’t hand select your products or customize their title or description.

What do you guys think? Other than showing discounted products, how else can you use the auto search feature?

In a previous blog post, I explained the content and purpose of affiliate data feeds.  However, I conveniently left out the fact that, for a variety of reasons, trying to actually use a data feed can be terribly frustrating, especially if you’re not a computer whiz. So, here are the top reasons why using data feeds is difficult and how SellFire makes it much easier.

1. The cryptic formats

If you have ever opened up a data feed, you know that it is not necessarily easy on the eyes. Data feeds are always published in some sort of spreadsheet like format and some of them have dozens of columns. Figuring out what each column is and how it relates to a product is a time consuming exercise. With SellFire, you never actually download or look at a datafeed file. You just use an easy to use search engine.

2. Different formats between networks

Predictably, not all affiliate networks publish data feeds in the same format. They all have different columns, different orders, and different column names. So, you know that cryptic format you just deciphered? You need to do it for every single network you work with. Using SellFire, you never have to worry about the format of each affiliate network. All the data is already standardized for you.

3. Incorrect data

Not all data feeds are created equal. In fact, some of them are down-right terrible. The images don’t load, the prices are wrong, or the landing page URL points to the wrong location. All this means that if you use the bad on your site, it’s sure to impact your click-through/conversion.  By displaying the product image and giving you a link to the product’s landing page, SellFire’s search engine results make it much easier to check the accuracy of data feed information. SellFire also offers store monitoring.

4. The enormous files

Work with a merchant with a lot of products? That’s great, right? Well, unless you need to try to open up a 10GB data feed file.  Here’s a heads up: Notepad doesn’t like those files. Neither does Excel. With SellFire, you never handle an actual data feed file, so this is not a problem at all.

5. Changing data

Even if the data feed has correct product data when you first publish it to your site, unless you are updating the data consistently it will quickly become out of date and then impact your conversion rate on click-through.  Updating data from a feed can be infeasible for all but the most sophisticated affiliates. Many merchants update their data feed daily or even more frequently. SellFire updates a merchant’s data as soon as it is published. It then can automatically update your websites with that new information.

6. Population issues

To complicate things further, merchants all decide to format their content differently. Some merchant’s place HTML in their descriptions, while other’s do not. Some merchants record their price in pennies rather than dollars. Some might put their content in the incorrect columns or delimit their categories with the wrong character. SellFire automatically sanitizes data as it is imported into the system, allowing you to spend your time on more important issues.

A data feed is simply a list of products sold by a company. Companies create and distribute data feeds to their affiliates to help the affiliate promote their products. As an internet affiliate marketer, you need to be aware of data feeds and how to use them. So, let’s take a look at the common aspects and usages of data feeds.

What information does a data feed contain?

Before we talk about how affiliates use data feeds, let’s first go into a bit more detail about exactly what information a data feed contains. As I said earlier, data feeds are just a list of the products sold by a company. However, a data feed doesn’t just contain the name of the product. In fact, the real power of a data feed is that it contains a lot of information about every product. What kind of information?

Your average data feed will contain, for every product in the list, at least:

• Name
• Description
• An image of the product
• Link to the product on the merchant’s site
• Price

Good data feeds will provide even more information, such as:

• List price
• Thumbnail image
• ISBN, UPC
• Specifications and sizes
• Merchant SKU
• Merchant Category
• Shipping price

So basically, when you are working with a well-defined data feed, you have pretty much all of the information you would ever want to know about a product.

How are data feeds used?

Affiliates can use data feeds to add product information to their web site or blog. Some common usages of data feeds are:

• Compliment product reviews with advertisements
• Create price comparison widgets
• Create full fledge “stores” where all the links land on the actual selling party.

Where do you get a data feed?

Data feeds are distributed to affiliates through the affiliate network’s website. These are companies like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and LinkShare.  To get the data feed for a particular company, you must first apply to and be approved for their affiliate program. You also apply via the affiliate network.

It’s been a while since I have posted anything so I thought I’d give a quick update on my progress. First, I’m happy to announce that SellFire will be attending Affiliate Summit West (ASW) 2012.  ASW is the premier affiliate marketing conference and it is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8th through 10th.  We don’t have a booth, but I am hoping to learn about the newest trends in the affiliate marketing industry and to make some new connections. Also, I’m currently targeting early January for a preliminary launch of the website, so I can use the conference as an opportunity to find our first customers.

Second, here is a rundown of things that I have been working on for the past few weeks.

• Primarily, I’ve been focused on making progress on SellFire’s core software – the WYSIWYG Affiliate Store Builder. The software is coming along nicely and the core functionality is mostly complete. I am now focusing on adding secondary features that bring me to parity with the competition.
• We contracted out work to a graphic designer to design the look and feel of the SellFire website. The mock-ups are mostly complete and I’m excited about the results.
• I’ve spoken with a couple of different legal firms. I’ll need legal help drafting the site’s terms and conditions and privacy policy. I expect that those documents will be completed within a month.
• SellFire is now officially a registered LLC in the state of Delaware. I formed the business entity using LegalZoom.

Lastly, I hope to start some initial beta testing within a month. If you would like to be a tester, please let me know.

In my first blog post, I explained that the internet start-up I am launching, SellFire.com, competes in the internet affiliate marketing industry and I described at a high level how that industry works. In this post, I am going to explain the services that SellFire will provide. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with how the affiliate marketing industry works, you should read that post first, otherwise you might be confused.

SellFire helps affiliates monetize their website traffic by giving affiliates tools that allow them to find, merchandise, deploy, and monitor advertisements on their website.  Let’s break down each of those features into something more specific.

Find

Using SellFire, affiliates will be able to search a large database of products, promotions, and advertisements that merchant’s are offering. If you are asking yourself, “Isn’t that what the affiliate network allows affiliates to do? Find things to promote?”, then you are right. However, SellFire offers two added advantages when it comes to locating products to promote. First, it allows affiliates to search an advertisers product catalog. To understand what I mean by “product catalog”, lets take a look at the various types of affiliate advertisements that are in use. There are four primary types of advertisements:

• The Banner –  The banner advertisement is an image that an affiliate embeds on their site. If you’ve been on the internet for only a few minutes, you have likely seen dozens of them.
• The Text Link – The text link is just a piece of promotional text that the affiliate places on their site. This type of ad is a lot less common.
• The Coupon - The coupon ad is a promotion that enables the buyer to receive a special promotion or pricing when they enter in a special code on the merchant’s site. You may have seen websites that have an “Enter coupon code” text box during their checkout process.
• The Product Placement - The product placement is a promotion regarding a specific product. Many merchants release to affiliate networks a file called a product data feed that contains detailed information about all of the products that they sell. The data feed will include a description, price, image, and other details about the product.

At first, SellFire will specialize in product placement advertisements. Traditionally, using product placement advertisements has required that an affiliate be pretty computer savy. This is because many affiliate networks do not let affiliates run searches against merchant data feeds. The networks also do not make it easy to tell when the product data feed has changed or become inactive. SellFire will give affiliates advanced search capabilities.

Second, SellFire allows affiliates to search multiple affiliate networks at once. To see why this is important, let’s take the example of an affiliate who wants to promote sunglasses. If this affiliate wants to make sure they find the best product with the best commission structure, they would need to join and then search for sunglasses on  several affiliate networks.  However, SellFire integrates with all of the largest affiliate networks. This lets affiliates be sure they have located the advertisements that is best for them in a single search.

SellFire consolidates advertisements from multiple affiliate networks

Merchandise

In addition to improved search, SellFire offers affiliates  tools that allows them to build web pages and components that display their advertisements in a professional and effective manner. To understand the value of this feature, you first need to understand more about product data feeds. As I explained earlier, a product data feed is a file published by a merchant that contains information on the products that they sell. If you were to open up a product data feed file, what you would see is something that looks like this:

Obviously, the data feed file is not in a format that can be presented to users of the affiliate’s website. The content needs to be transformed into an advertisement that is compelling and easy for the site user to read. SellFire’s software allows affiliates to build storefronts and product pages in a point and click manner. Using the software, affiliates will be able to easily turn the information in that same data feed file into a professional looking product results page like this:

	Sony 42″ LCD TV Now only $1000.00! This TV is great. Has a beautiful picture!
	Samsung 60″ LCD TV Now only $2000.00! A 60″ TV will have you feeling like you’re at the movie theatre!

In addition to simple product advertisement generation, SellFire will offer additional merchandising tools and services which I’ll talk about more in a future post.

Integrate and Deploy

The third benefit SellFire provides is that the software makes it easy for affiliates to deploy the advertisement displays built on the SellFire site onto their own site. The affiliate can choose from multiple ways to integrate their advertisements into their site. They can add a simple blurb of Javascript, use a WordPress plugin, or for the more technically inclined, use  a web service API. Their is no complicated code to write or HTML to maintain. SellFire does all of that for you.

Monitor

The fourth benefit provided by SellFire is that it monitors the advertisements on its members sites to ensure that they are both enabled and accurate. The advertisements on an affiliate’s site can become deactivated or inaccurate for lots of different reasons. The merchant selling the product or service could run out of stock, go out of business, change the price, or remove the example image. If the two become out of sych, or if the merchant stops selling the product all together, the affiliate is wasting valuable advertising space with an ineffective or broken ad.

SellFire’s monitoring service constantly checks the affiliate and merchant web sites to make sure that the advertisement that is on an affiliate site stays up to date with the product description on the merchant site.  When the service detects a difference, the affiliate will be notified. Without this service, affiliates would have to manually check each of their links to ensure that the advertisement is active and accurate.  This would be a serious time drain since many professional affiliates maintain hundreds or thousands of links.

When I tell my friends, family, and coworkers that I am leaving my full time job to launch an internet startup, the obvious question I hear most often is “What is your company going to do?”.

A dozen or so blank faces later, I’ve found out that my business idea is not easy to describe to those that are not indoctrinated into the world of internet affiliate marketing. This is definitely a risk to the business. How am I going to sell customers my service if they cannot understand it? So, before I write in detail about the services that SellFire will provide, I figured a good inaugural blog post would be an in-depth explanation of the industry where SellFire will play.

SellFire competes in the internet affiliate marketing industry. In order to understand the affiliate marketing industry, you have to know about the three major players: internet merchants, internet affiliates, and affiliate networks. An internet merchant is something that everyone is already familiar with. These are companies that sell something online. Think Amazon.com and Overstock.com. Those are two examples with name recognition, but of course there are literally hundreds of thousands of companies trying to sell their products and services on the internet.

An internet affiliate may be a concept you haven’t heard of, but if you browse the web regularly you have definitely seen their work. An internet affiliate is a person who markets the products or services of a merchant. In return for their marketing efforts, the merchant compensates the internet affiliate. All internet affiliates work solely on commission. Merchants only pay affiliates when the affiliate’s marketing efforts result in either a sale or a visit on the merchant’s website. Internet affiliates generally own and operate their own websites and blogs. Affiliates place advertisements and product reviews on their website. If visitors to the affiliate’s site click an advertisement and subsequently place an order, the affiliate gets paid by the merchant.

Let’s try to make this really simple by showing an example interaction as a picture.

The interaction in the example above is:

1. A person visits a website blog
2. The blog is owned by an affiliate who advertises for Amazon. The blog has Amazon advertisements.
3. The person clicks the Amazon advertisement on the blog and then buys something from Amazon.
4. Amazon pays the affiliate a commission on the sale

Here is a “live” example of an internet affiliate:

So, now you understand what an internet affiliate and merchant is. But, how do affiliates and merchants find one another? How are these business relationships made? There are three primary means in which a merchant and an affiliate can connect:
 

1. The merchant finds the affiliate site via a search engine or other form of research, and contacts the affiliate directly.
2. The affiliate recognizes that their website traffic represents a target audience for a merchant, and contacts the merchant directly.
3. The affiliate and the merchant are connected via an affiliate network

Affiliate networks are the middle man in the affiliate marketing industry. Successful affiliate networks work with thousands of merchants and tens of thousands of affiliates. You may have heard of some of them such as Commission Junction or Share A Sale. The networks provide the following services:

1. Act as a place where merchants and affiliates can connect and find one another. Merchants can search for affiliates and affiliates can search for merchants.
2. Provide merchants with tools to upload information about their advertisements and promotions to the network
3. Provide affiliates with a search engine to find advertisements and promotions relevant to their website’s audience.
4. Provides tracking software and acts as a neutral third party to ensure that the merchant is paying the affiliate the correct amount

This is the industry where SellFire will play, internet affiliate marketing. The major players in the affiliate marketing industry are affiliates, merchants, and affiliate networks. In the next blog post, I will describe what service SellFire will provide to these parties.