Data feed revenues and sites

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Fastb

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Oct 7, 2009
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www.healthandnutritionforums.com
I bought a really good data feed converter from Click Bank and then got approved by a ton of merchants on CJ, LinkShare (went ahead and paid the merchandiser fee), Google Affiliate and ShareASale . I really like the concept.

My question is.... for those of you that have worked with feeds before is it smarter to set up a bunch of micro-niche sites or just build one huge site with several million items.

I can't do both because the big site will take a lot of time and promotion and the little sites take up just as much time finding domain names and setting up templates and such.

My big concern is Bing / Yahoo because my experience is that they don't like to index more than 20 pages on most sites so a huge site won't get much exposure on Bing.

Google likes to list big sites and looks to treat them pretty well in results.

Any serious input would be appreciated as I'm fixing to invest a lot of time and don't want to go in the wrong direction.
 
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It consolidates all your calls in one window and lets you manage it. Just like you manage social networks with hootsuite.
 
Just do a search in ClickBank's marketplace for "datafeeds" - that's how I found it.

It's actually a pretty good conceept. What it does is take any of your product catalog datafeeds (CSV files) from your merchants and converts them all into one searchable MySQL database. I bought it through my own CB hoplink so the total cost for the software (after my commission) was $25.00 and they then installed it for me for free... cheap enough.

I use it one one website with the four big affiliate networks. I just entered in my affiliate ID into the admin and upload the raw product datafeeds from my merchants, it does everything else. It creates an affiliate store from the different datafeeds in my database. It uses a header and footer template file to customize the look and match my site. What I like most about it is that I can have maybe five CJ merchants, two more LS merchants, a couple of ShareASale merchants, etc. all in one store and all pretty much automated.

Google Affiliate Network and CJ actually push the files to my server every night and I just get up every morning and log into my admin and press the button on the feeds I want updated and installed. The ShareASale and LinkShare feeds are not so easy because I have to grab the datafeeds from their site and upload through the browser tool or FTP when the feeds need updating.

As an example... I have a nutrition site that I added a datafeed shop to by combining feeds from 12 different specialty merchants (about 80,000 nutrition items). The results where much better than I ever would have expected. My site has information on some really obscure topics like "red clover for cancer" and "gluten free foods". After I loaded in the product feeds into my store I found that I had about 80 products that came up in searches for "red clover" and about 600 "gluten free" products. That's stuff you can't really run down to WalMart to purchase. I made a sale right off the bat on $500 worth of brown seaweed juice (fucoidan seaweed anyone?) at a 16% commission ($80+ from that one sale). I sold some other specialty items and now I am hooked these datafeeds!!

So back to my original question.

What I have is the age old question of "gambling" VS "Investment". Is it smarter to make a zillion cheaper small niche sites with three or four highly targeted product feeds each - following a google sniper type system, or would it be smarter to put in the effort and create one power site with hundreds of merchants - kind of like a mall.

I believe a network of small sites will generate much better short term cash flow, but a large site would generate more repeat business and would be easier to sell if I ever decide to get out of the business.
 
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How do you handle your menus? Are the Categories and Subcategories scrambled if you are getting feeds from different affiliate programs?

How are you building your sites? Are you using a CMS (Drupal, Joomla, Maneto) or Wordpress? I'm definitely interested in the feeds idea.

My solution has been to take the data feed and run it through an excel spreadsheet to spit out the data I want/need and upload it to my site.
 
I'd say one big site with all of those products. I've worked on the advertiser side of things, and some of our top performers did this same exact thing (one site, bringing in multiple feeds, with tons of products). Just make sure to categorize them correctly. Of course, the more relevant, the better.
 
One big site would get hit by Google Panda sooner or later unless you cram it full of unique content, dynamic content, articles, snippets, etc.

I would suggest going for tighter, more focused minisites.
 
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