AvantLink Free Tools: Dynamic Coupon Feed

9:43 pm   -   July 5th, 2006

AvantLink Free Tools: Dynamic Coupon Feed

Hello Everyone,

So far on ABW I have featured threads for several tools available for free to Affiliates in AvantLink. Once you’re accepted and active as an Affiliate, you have access to a fully-integrated tool center. With this post I would like to highlight the Dynamic Coupon Feed. I’ll give a brief overview of how it works and some of the great benefits of having your embedded Affiliate ID distributed around the web via RSS (either through 2.0 sites like Squidoo.com or through your own web pages).

Note: As with all our tools, Affiliates can either grab the simple code to plug-in the JavaScript, or they can use RSS as a way to distribute these offers. This discussion will focus on the use of RSS.

With the Dynamic Coupon Feed, merchants can basically ‘flag’ an offer or offers to be included in their feeds. AMs do this when they set-up their campaigns, and the flagged items generally consists of any promo that goes above and beyond a basic transaction. For example, a 50% off sale on certain products, free shipping or Affiliate coupons can all be flagged to be included in the merchant’s Dynamic Coupon Feed. We encourage text offers be flagged by the merchants, because for those using the RSS output version of the Dynamic Coupon Tool, the content is fully spiderable to the SEs.

Three best practices we’ve seen so far for utilizing this tool include:

Publish dynamic offers to your site via RSS. This gives Affiliates the ability to dynamically add spiderable content of merchant promos and special offers to their web site(s). For example, build a page full of unique content dedicated to ToolKing.com & their Coupons and Sales, then add your Dynamic Coupon Feed subscription for ToolKing.com to that page.
View new merchant offers easily through your default RSS reader. This gives Affiliates the ability to plug in the RSS feed to their readers and see (immediately) when a merchant has added a new offer. No need to receive an email or login to the network to see the latest offers to add.

Distribute RSS feeds that include your embedded Affiliate IDs. A great example of a web 2.0 community site that would allow you to publish your Affiliate feeds is Squidoo.com. With Squidoo, you can create a lense all about the product you are promoting, optimizes that lense, then publish your Affiliate coupon feeds (and even your own site URL) through that community.

New and creative ways to publish RSS through 2.0 sites are showing up all the time. These Affiliate enabled RSS tools are a perfect fit!!

To get started using the Dynamic Coupon Feed follow these simple steps:

Login to your Affiliate account at www.AvantLink.com. Click ‘Tools’ from the main menu. Once in the tool center, under ‘Dynamic Coupon Tool’ select the ‘Create a new coupon feed’ link.
Begin configuration of your Dynamic Coupon Feed subscription by following the steps. Your subscription can be configured to use offers from a single merchant or from several, and you can create as many subscriptions as you want. There are ‘Help’ notes at every stage.
Save feed configuration. Based on your integration method, you’ll either be provided with a JavaScript to paste on your site, or a URL to point your RSS reader at. Please note: We do provide a sample script that allows Affiliates to publish RSS feeds to their sites.

Once you have configured a subscription you’ll have the ability to go in to your account interface and modify it at any time.

We’re getting excited about some of the applications that are compatible to the Affiliate ID embedded RSS feeds we are providing. More to come soon a long these lines!!

Thank you for your support,

Gary Marcoccia
__________________
Gary Marcoccia
AvantLink Affiliate Marketing Network
Email: gmarcoccia[at]avantlink.com
Phone: 435-785-8067
Fax: 435-487-9083