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A Powerful Yet Little-Used Affiliate Profit Tool
by Kathy Burns-Millyard

Promoting affiliate products is an excellent way to earn steady income from home. In fact, many can earn massive income from promoting affiliate products... if they do things a bit differently.

Now, it's common for new affiliate marketers to think the only thing they can promote as an affiliate is information products. And too often, new marketers also seem to think the only affiliate products that sell well are all about making money online. This couldn't be farther from the truth.

In fact, my most successful affiliate websites are built around physical products. And these products have nothing to do with affiliate marketing, making money online, or starting a home based business.

The products I promote are all common, everyday items that people buy at local stores every single day. Think about some of the things you shop for offline...

- Ladies like to buy things that make their houses pretty: Lamps, bed spreads or sheet sets, and knick knacks are a few examples.

- Men tend to love buying power tools, misc gadgets and gizmos, or accessories for their cars.

- Both men and women will buy jewelry, clothing, and even shoes too. Then there are grandparents who love buying baby toys and learning tools for their grandchildren.

The list of things people buy online is almost endless, but I can tell you this: It's a much larger market than the "make money" and information-only markets are.

The catch however, is that promoting lots of individual physical items can be a bit more difficult to do. Let's face it, just one merchant could have ten thousand different products for an affiliate to promote, and that presents management problems. How do you get thousands of products onto your website - with pictures, descriptions and links - quickly and easily?

I'll tell you how: Datafeeds. This is a little known about, and little used tool provided by merchants to their affiliates... and using it can create incredible profits over time.

An affiliate datafeed is often confused with an RSS feed. They're not the same thing though. Affiliate datafeeds are quite simply a spreadsheet type file filled with product information. The information contained in the affiliate datafeed file usually includes a product name, description, picture, and price. Usually datafeeds include many more things too, and these are quite useful to affiliates. Some for instance, include keywords relevant to the affiliate product. Others might include both large and small images, sale prices and shipping information.

In short, an affiliate datafeed is just a collection of raw product information. This is a powerful tool for affiliates though, because there could be thousands of products available to promote. And every single product in the datafeed is potentially another website page, and many more targeted keywords for visitors to find you with. And last but not least of course: Having thousands of products available for sale in a shopping-style system gives you the opportunity to earn much more money.

Until recently, some affiliates were aware of how powerful datafeeds can be, but they were afraid of the technology. Datafeeds can seem complicated, very technical, and downright scary. Once you realize that they're just lines of text though - with information about specific products - you should see there's no reason to fear them. And new tools on the market these days make the use of datafeeds useful to marketers of almost any skill level.

If you've thought about using affiliate datafeeds to start increasing your profits, I encourage you to look closer at this option today. It truly is a very powerful way to create extremely profitable, targeted niche websites.

About the Author

© 2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Kathy has worked online full time since 1997, and the bulk of her income is generated using affiliate datafeeds. Her new software: The Affiliate Datafeed Profit System (http://www.gurugazette.com/WPAPS/), helps almost anyone create a fully automated affiliate datafeed product site using standard WordPress blog software.

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