Years ago, when RSS feeds were still new, we saw potential uses way beyond basic subscription. One of them was how affiliate managers could use RSS feeds as a tool for their affiliates to promote their products.

Compared to data feeds, RSS is the perfect solution because it is an open standard. Because there is a standard a valid feed can be used in many different tools and these tools can do many different things. And because it is open, people have developed a variety of tools to manipulate and utilize the content contained in those feeds. Ok, so you get that. But what can you use RSS feeds for? Or more specifically, what type of feeds can you provide that are useful to your affiliates? Try this.

New product feed – this should be a feed that contains nothing but news. It could be about new products, new features, improved features or information about sales, closings, limited time offerings, coupons.

Content feed – affiliates are content producers too (big time). Content can be time consuming to write and expensive to hire out. How about supplying a feed of your articles where the affiliate can grab and automatically load into their blogs? Every time the feed is updated, a new post is created in their blog. From there all they need to do is edit the link or URL. It cuts down lots of copying and pasting. I believe this could also increase the chances of an affiliate publishing an article because when they log into their blogs the article is already there waiting for their approval.

Email feed – same concept as the content feed but this time, put the emails you would normally give affiliates in RSS format. What the affiliate can do then if he chooses to, is use the feed in their email list. Some list service providers allow you to ‘import’ feeds into an email. So each time the feed is updated, an email with the feed content will be sent out to the list subscribers.

Re-branded blog feeds – if you already publish a blog, allow affiliates to ‘brand’ your feeds with their ID. They can put the headlines anywhere like on their blog sidebar. Every time a new post is published, their sidebar gets updated, clicks are cookied to them and you gain some traffic.

Mix it up. Don’t just limit it to your blog. Let affiliates re-brand the new product feed we talked about earlier.

This should give you some food for thought to create great tools your affiliates will want to use. If you need a way to offer re-branded RSS feeds, you’ll want to check out our RSSBrander.