Building a WooCommerce Store Using Affiliate Feeds with Eric Busch

Eric Busch with Datafeedr.com shows us the right way to use affiliates when building a WooCommerce online store.

In episode 146, I am chatting with with Eric Busch from Datafeedr, a plugin that lets you easily import products from affiliate data feeds into your WooCommerce shop.

This is an interesting space, the use of Datafeedr with WooCommerce. Eric starts by telling us what is the most effective way of using affiliate links for your online store and whether it should be integrated with your existing products and store.

We also talk about the mistakes he has seen and where that sweet spot is for how many affiliates to sell via your WooCommerce store. He ends by sharing a site that is doing it right— and he gives us some final tips.

What Eric had to share:

What is Datafeedr and how did it come to be?

… so instead of them hiring a programmer to upload data feeds into their WordPress website, we just create a WordPress plugin where they can search for products they want to import straight into their WordPress website …

… we have about 500 million products in our database from over 30 different affiliate networks, which represent 14-15,000 different merchants …

… it lets you easily import the products you want to import and then it keeps those products up to date …

Is it viable to start up an online store with just affiliate products?

… importing products to a WooCommerce store is really not enough. There’s not enough value there in order for Google to rank you higher in the search engine result pages …

… we always encourage our users to create some value on their website, whether that be blog posts or articles, video content …

… a lot of our customers will write pretty long-form reviews of products and then embed data feed or comparison set widgets into their blog posts, which actually pull in a different page rank …

For new site owners, how do you get accepted by these affiliate networks with nothing selling on your site?

… we always tell everyone to start with their content, start with their brand, start building value on the site …

… if you’re going to put Google Adsense on your site, you need some content there for people to come and consume, for people to stick around, for Google to actually find you …

Are there ever instances where store owners will mix affiliate products in with their own products?

… if you’re mixing in your own products with affiliate products, the add-to-cart kind of metaphor falls down …

Is there such as thing as having too many affiliate products in your store?

… if you want to import a million products into your WordPress store, your store is going to be screaming for help because it’s not optimized for that number of posts …

… I think they are doing some stuff to further optimize the database to make it more scalable. But right now 100,000 products is tough. Because it’s not just those products. Then you’ve got to keep them up to date and then you have to host the images …

… if you can focus on a niche, it makes it much easier for you to target and write content around that niche so you get found in the search engines. You want Google to recognize what your site’s about. Because if you go super broad, Google is going to be, like, I don’t know what you do ….

Can you give us a few last tips?

… there’s other things you need to do to to ensure that your sites are not just the thin affiliate website, because Google doesn’t want 10 affiliate websites in the search engine results…

Where to Find Eric

Datafeedr.com

Resources

Affiliate Guideline for Google

WooCommerce Shortcodes

Chubstr.com

Read our post on Datafeedr over on BobWP.com

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