Affiliates, did you know that in addition to publishing promotional-related (dynamically updated) content on your sites, you can also promote RSS subscriptions to those feeds? Think about that for a second. If you’re site visitors subscribe to one of these RSS feeds from AvantLink that you promote, then your tracking details are embedded in all links within that feed…for the life of that feed subscription!

(Note: You can easily promote RSS subscriptions via the tools highlighted below by grabbing popular reader icons just like you would a banner, and pasting that in your site along side the feed itself with a call to action like “Subscribe to this daily deal from Patagonia!”. We also provide a standard RSS icon embedded with tracking code as well as the RSS URL itself.)

Fast forward months later, and to that RSS feed sitting in someone’s reader or live bookmarks after the 60 day cookie from the click is long expired. The shopper you enticed to subscribe sees a killer deal from one of our retailers, clicks the link directly from their RSS reader or live bookmark, and there you have it; your Affiliate cookie is set again for another 60 days (or whatever cookie life the particular merchant offers). This gives you, the Affiliate, an additional level of ownership over that customer that goes above and beyond the cookie duration defined on a standard click.

We call this Affiliate Link Syndication, and it’s  been around since we opened our Affiliate network in 2005. I talked about it previously here, but the post was a little long winded (which I’m notorious for), so I wanted to bring it up again to be sure everyone knows about this RSS promotional option.

And if you take this one step further, think about the possibilities in terms of syndication to other sites. Of course, you should check the terms of use for content syndication to any site you don’t own. But for the purpose of this article I’ll use Squidoo.com as an example (their TOS allows the syndication of any content to their site). Squidoo offers an RSS module for use. So take one of the RSS URLs we provide with various campaign subscriptions, paste that into your Squidoo RSS module, and you’ll have content that’s not only dynamic but parsed to static HTML. Gourmet Google food indeed…

Check out the following tool offerings for Affiliate Link Syndication using RSS available from AvantLink.com (note you can find any of these by clicking “Tools” on the main menu once you login):

• Dynamic Coupon/Deal Tools
  • Dynamic Coupon/Deal Feeds (RSS integration option)
  • Coupon/Deal Syndication Links
  • Deal Of The Day Sign-up (RSS integration options)
• Datafeed Manager
  • RSS Product Feeds

Thanks for reading and as always comments, questions or suggestions encouraged. Gary M