We’ve been watching Greg iron out a killer concept and site that features product deals by the hour! Daily deals are pretty cool, but a new deal every hour from a different store? Face it, that’s beyond cool.

Here’s the kicker. The entire HourDeal.com site is powered by the Deal of the Day tool and Affiliate embedded RSS feeds from AvantLink.

Here’s a testimonial from HourDeal.com Founder Greg Blasko:

“Based on the concept of sites like RedTagSports.com and Steepandcheap.com, we came up with a similar model based on the ‘HourDeal’ where a new heavily discounted item is featured every hour. AvantLink’s Deal of the Day tool is the foundation for the functionality of HourDeal.com.

Using the Customized Text/HTML Ad integration method, it was very easy for us to define a featured item and RSS template for the HourDeal that could be used for multiple merchants. As always, AvantLink’s support team was very helpful answering the few technical questions we did have.”

Follow HourDeal on Twitter!

Time for another blog article for the Best Practices category of AvantShare.

---

Affiliates, with this article I would like to discuss a unique tool that’s available to you only through AvantLink. It’s officially called the Coupon Feed Syndication tool in the network tool center, but a similar variant of the tool comes with the dynamic Deal Of The Day campaigns we provide as well.

This is a unique proposition because it allows you to syndicate your Affiliate feeds (product content or ad campaigns) to your site visitors by way of RSS feed distribution. When one of your site visitors in fact subscribes, the outbound links from these subscriptions will have your Affiliate tracking embedded in them. This provides a new level of customer ownership for you that moves well beyond that of a cookie placed on an end user’s PC.

With these powerful Affiliate feed syndication options, you can effectively promote RSS subscriptions to deal feeds, as well as display the feed content on your site(s). So it’s very much in your interest to become proficient at not only selling the products, but selling subscriptions to the feeds from AvantLink!

This is sometimes hard to explain to folks because it doesn’t fit the traditional mold of any type of Affiliate marketing campaign that you may have seen before. But I’m here to tell you that it’s VERY effective, and from those who have embraced these syndication techniques for the deal feeds, we’ve seen impressive sales volume.

Your question at this point might be: “How do I go about promoting subscriptions to RSS feeds for coupons and daily deals?”

Ok it’s simple. Really simple. Just remember that every merchant on our platform has the ability to easily flag text links to be included in the Dynamic Coupon Feed. Once they do that, it’s accessible to you.

Here’s how to offer RSS subscriptions to merchant coupon feeds:

1. Login to your Affiliate account, and click “Tools” from the main menu.
2. Under “Coupon Feed Syndication”, click “Get Merchant RSS Coupon Feed Syndication Links”.
3. Select the merchant for the coupon feed RSS subscription you want to promote, and your website.
4. Click “Get HTML”.

After you click “Get HTML”, in part, here are the instructions you’ll find:

“Subscribe icons for some of the most popular RSS readers are available below. Simply grab the code, paste to your site, and encourage your customers to sign-up to the feed. This creative has your Affiliate tracking ID embedded, which gives you lasting control over that customer.”

So in essence, you’re retrieving the RSS reader subscription icons through our system just like you would retrieve a banner.

Paste this code on your web page next to the coupon feed itself, and offer a call to action like “Subscribe to the REI deals feed and have their latest sales, promotions and coupons delivered directly to you.”

Note that you can find these same RSS subscription icons in the output HTML for the RSS integration option of the Deal Of The Day tool. So the same call to action (encouragement to subscribe) can be applied to those as well. Both the coupon feeds and the daily deal feeds are compelling subscriptions for shoppers, because it saves them some bucks. Take a stab at it, and you may just secure long term subscribers who will set your Affiliate cookie on every click from the feed for months, even years, to come!

Comments, questions and suggestions are certainly encouraged!

Gary & AvantLink

I wanted to let Affiliates know that one of the merchants that make up our top Outdoor/Recreation category just rolled out a dynamic Deal of the Day campaign at AvantLink. Proboardshop.com will now feature daily discounts at least 30% off retail from the world’s best board sport brands. Proboardshop now joins The-House Affiliate program and several other stores who offer this unique online marketing tool for Affiliates.

Affiliates, to configure Proboardshop’s Deal of the Day login, click on ‘Tools’ from the main menu, and then ‘Deal Of The Day Sign-up’. Select your website, the merchant and integration method…and you’re off and running with a powerful piece of creative for your site page(s)! Optimize a page around outdoor gear deals, then utilize the RSS options of our tools and the end output result will be spiderable fresh daily content. Google food, if you will ;).

Login -> Tools –> Deal Of The Day Sign-up

Please note: We upgraded the Deal of the Day tool. We’ve now added the ability to customize the layout of the DOTD campaigns during the ad configuration. Fully customize the Text/HTML Ad (RSS), and the Text/HTML Ad (JavaScript).

Gary & AvantLink