Recently Jeff Molander asked over at Revenews asks

why haven’t affiliates thought of things like delivering coupons via cell phones? I wonder… especially considering how willing affiliates were (still are!) to take risks on buying pay-per-click search terms as a means to bring marketers into the age of PPC search marketing (which, I have to admit, they have). There are many tech vendors who can help affiliates innovate as well.

We can get weather alerts, stock trade alerts… heck every kind of alert you’d need it seems. In short, why has the innovation stopped short? Could it be possible that coupon hounds wouldn’t find SMS messages on the latest deals, sales (consider the potential for time-sensitive Black Friday and Cyber Monday alerts?!) useful? I wager that some users would even PAY for such a service.

Actually these are the same questions I asked myself in December 2003. After some research I thought I hit the gold mine (it is still but unfortunately not mined you’ll see why later). Anyway… I discovered RSS was the perfect vehicle to deliver coupons and time sensitive deals. Of course back then RSS isn’t as big as it is now and there aren’t so many cool tools. No matter what the delivery end point is – phone, web, SMS etc RSS is the key in my humble opinion. There are already RSS readers for phones and RSS can be received in so many ways, I predict more uses of it will come in 2006 but I digress.

The only problem is – the effort. I think the bottleneck is not so much on the affiliate end but the merchant’s end. There has to be a better way for merchant marketers to pass on codes to affiliates than the old copy/paste routine.

For me to publish an RSS feed with all these deals/specials, I’d have to spend hours just cutting/pasting code and if the affiliate program is run by places like CJ or Linkshare they can be awfully slow. The bounty for most deal sensitive products are also low. Then I have to repeat this every week – no thanks.

Data feeds? Nice idea but most of them are reserved for the privileged affiliate and even so the feeds differ from one merchant to another.

Some merchants will send me emails with my affiliate links already coded – well that is ok but what would be better is if they would just send me a text based email that’s comma delimited. At least using that – I can craft some kind of software to extract the data to turn into RSS feeds immediately.