The Benefits And Cons Of Automated Affiliate Blogs Explained

Automated affiliate blogs are virtually hands-free. Instead of posting content or products by hand, you can set up a special script that will post product images, descriptions and your affiliate links automatically. The scripts which accomplish this for you are known as affiliate data feed scripts.

The major affiliate networks, such as Shareasale (http://www.shareasale.com/ ), allow merchants the option of uploading data feeds of all their products.

These feeds are actually just text files which contain a list of their products, specially formatted to be pulled in and displayed by a data feed script.

 As an affiliate, you can find the merchants that have data feeds, join their programs and request data feed access. Once access is granted, you can get the information two ways:

1. Download the information directly in either a txt file or .csv (Excel) file, then post that information selectively (by hand), or by feeding it into an existing script.

2. Set your script up to download the data file directly from the merchant via FTP.
This is the preferred method because most scripts can be set to run periodic updates, checking the feed file for new information, then posting it.

The benefit of running an automated affiliate blog is that you have your own virtual store, in a matter of speaking. Your content creation work is minimized, and you can focus more on getting traffic to the site. But the cons or disadvantage of running an automated affiliate site are mostly due to the fact that both live humans and search engines may view your blog as spam.

So, if you choose to set up a blog, I recommend putting a human touch on it. Go in and post some of your own content to break things up, make the site more dynamic and better optimize the site for your keywords.

All the best.