13 November 2008

Microformats in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate networks are always looking for new ways to make it easier for affiliates to push merchants' websites. Back in the late 1990s, we mainly saw the use of banners, but these days all sorts of new - and often more convenient - ways to market a merchant website have arisen, such as widgets, coupons and product feeds.

It's now a must for merchants selling products online to provide their affiliates with a product feed if they truly want to make the most of the affiliate network and really get their products out there. This is because the product feed will be taken by affiliates, which will plug it into their Content Management System (CMS) and then use the contents to populate their website.

However, creating a product feed is not always a simple task and can often cost a lot of money to do. But never fear if you're a merchant, Google Base spotted this and now accepts Shopping.com and Shopzilla feeds. This move from Google could save merchants big bucks developing a separate feed for Google Base.

Microformats

As HTML develops, bigmouthmedia believes that microformats will begin to play a larger part on the web, in affiliate marketing - and in Google Base. Microformats are pieces of HTML that you can assign to other areas of HTML that will add machine-readability functions to normal web pages without interfering with user-readability. Confused? Then close your eyes for the table. Microformats look like this:

Microformats in Affiliate Marketing

Simple, right? These microformats could play a big role in future developments.

Nearly every retail website will make use of a Content Management System. Within this CMS, product pages will be created based on a template. Most retail websites will provide a product feed for affiliates but, as HTML develops, microformats could be used to create product feeds using existing resources.

Microformats in action

Using emerging HTML standards, a merchant could mark-up their product pages with specific microformats.
The affiliate network could then send a crawler (like Googlebot) to crawl the merchant's website and extract all the data held within the microformats.
This data could then be populated into a master database and provided to affiliates in various ways for convenience e.g. feed, CSV, XML, and TSV etc.
Affiliates can then use this data at their own discretion to populate their websites.

Overall, this process would result in an easier way for merchants to provide data and for affiliates to make better use of it - a beneficial arrangement for both parties. Hopefully, microformats will be used in this way as an industry standard, allowing the creation and extraction of content in a more effective way.

Google and Yahoo! have both dabbled in microformats; Google Maps with the use of the hCard and Yahoo's Kelkoo with the use of the hListing, but no official W3C standard is in place. Bigmouthmedia predicts this may change in the near future.