By Jerry Holliday
The attraction of owning affiliate ecommerce stores is pretty obvious to anyone looking to make money through affiliate programs. Firstly, you can have multiple categories, all creating an income. Then you actually have your own website whereby you can capture email addresses if you want and build your list. Then third, you have the benefit of search engine food for the spiders giving you organic search result traffic.
One mistake that many new affiliate store owners make is creating their affiliate stores themselves. They then usually end up spending large amounts of time trying to overcome technical problems they have no expertise in.
I did this myself many years ago. I built an affiliate superstore that sold everything under the sun from A to Z — what a mistake! Even when the site was finished, the earlier pages needed updating because the merchant had changed something, like the price or picture, or even discontinued the product entirely. This would created bad links scattered throughout the store. Needless to say, I gave up on that particular project.
Even if you outsource and pay a programmer to build your affiliate ecommerce website, you could be looking at a small fortune before you even get started.
The allure of having your own multi-product store, however, is very strong. Any affiliate marketer understands that the more products you are able to promote, the more commission checks will come flooding through your mailbox. If you’re currently just promoting one or two programs at a time, it might be worthwhile to explore a new option that will allow you to increase your profits more than you ever thought possible.
Internet commerce has created more opportunities for affiliate marketers than any other business program ever has — the opportunity to have an entire ecommerce online storefront, full of products you can make commissions off of, all within whatever niche you choose!
We, as affiliate marketers, are living in exciting times because now, having our own multiple ecommerce online stores is a lot simpler thanks to wonderful data feeds. These feeds can display products from many different merchant stores, giving your store unique content footprint for the search engines to follow.
Data feeds are very similar to the RSS feeds used by blogs. The way the merchant feeds work is they display constantly updating descriptions, pictures, and prices of their products. Affiliate marketers are then able to then integrate these feeds into their own ecommerce store and rake in the commissions!
Jerry Holiday publishes Intelligent Internet Marketing where you can learn how to have an ecommerce affiliate feed without having to update or worry about using up your precious time and money resources.
