David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

Affiliate Future seems to be progressing quite nicely in developing a robust affiliate-centric website. Admittedly, their Beta site has a few loose ends (hence why it's still Beta) and there are a few affiliate customer care issues that crop up now and again on A4U, but it's safe to assume that AF are on the way up.

A few websites I'm working on tend to revolve around AF as they seem to have several niches they are very strong in. The upshot is that I'm promoting their merchants more than several other networks.

Xenon is their new data manipulation tool and is set to rock the affiliate world. Having been asked to take part in Beta trials, I thought I would share some of the concepts and the benefits for affiliates.

So here they are!
 
Data Feeds

These have never been AF's strong point. To date, they have comprised of a ".txt" file that gets downloaded and has no affiliate data embedded.

Well all that is set to change.

To begin, we now have a choice of XML or CSV files. CSV is easier to manipulate in Excel but XML is more standardised and easier to manipulate by scripts (in my experience).

Next, we can download category feeds rather than merchant feeds. The plus side of this is that we could download "Books & Magazines" rather than downloading and editing feeds from umpteen different merchants. Also, you don't need to sign up with loads of merchants as they'll automatically be signed up for under the reporting name of "Xenon". Another handy time saver.

Naturally, there is still an option to download merchant specific feeds so don't panic if you've already set your site up like this.

Feeds need to be "created" to which you can specify whether you download them via FTP or through the web. This can take up to 15 minutes but my test feed took a whopping 10 seconds :-)

Do you want to know the best bit though? FEEDS ARE PRE-ENCODED WITH MY AFFILIATE DETAILS! Congrats to AF on this one.

Various new fields have been created (although some aren't populated in my test feed). The feeds now appear more like offerings from the likes of Paid On Results or Affiliate Window.

Product Feed Web Services

This one's a bit sketchy but it sounds like the beginnings of a Shop Window type script, where affiliates can pull product data from AF themselves rather than from downloaded product feeds.

Content Units

With the power of Xenon already exploited for the purpose of data services and product feeds, a natural next step move is content units using these sources.

A variety of content unit sizes are available. After selecting this, you proceed to selecting the product range. This can be by category and/or by keyword.

You then customise the results to be displayed how you want (by changing fonts, colours and background images).



Again with this, all commissions are recorded under Xenon so you don't need to apply to each program you want to use.

Xenon Search

Last but not least is another logical advance on the Xenon system by replacing AF's archaic search tools.

You can do one of two things. Firstly, you can create search boxes to put on your site. Secondly, you can create deeplinks to specific search results.

Here's an example of a deeplink to search results for sausage.

Here's a search box, coloured using a hideous shade of purple to see what it would look like :-)



(my CSS seems to interfere with it - oops!)

Summary

The Xenon range of tools bring Affiliate Future bang up to date with current offerings from rival networks. This is certainly a welcome move and will undoubtedly be one of the best they have made.

However, these changes bring them to the same point as the afore mentioned rivals. Affiliate Future need to push forward and extend further on the Xenon tools (IMO) creating various powerful widgets not yet offered by competitors. They also need to get a lot more of their merchants to offer data feeds if they have a chance at winning over large amounts of affiliates.

The Beta trial prerequisites were that the server is running slow and only a handful of merchants are live on it. Bear this in mind when using the search boxes above :-)