datafeed driven sites

[Nick]

I'm wondering what's everyones opinion on datafeed driven sites, and what they are good for.

I had plans on opening about 6 sites each for 10 different datafeeds I have, which works out to be about 60 sites.

They seem to bring in a decent amount of traffic, and almost all of them are good for at lease a pr3 out of the gate. However, I'm reconsidering whether or not I should go through with this.

[incka]

Are you making money with your zzounds ones? If you are go for it!

[chromate]

I wouldn't do 6 different sites for each datafeed. Unless they're all massive stores offering a product range like Amazon, then there's little point. You're going to have a very hard time trying to manage 60 sites, monitoring traffic, keywords, backlinks etc.

Only open different sites for each of the datafeeds if you think the products are so different it actually warrants it. I speak from experience, I almost wish I hadn't produced 3 separate kitchen sites :) Though with only 3, it's not that much of a big deal.

With product searches like Froogle getting more popular, the general consensus is that pure affiliate sites are time limited. In a couple of years or maybe less, your 60 sites may be worthless.

You would be better off building an affiliate site and an accompanying content site for a selection of your feeds. There are a few advantages in doing this:

1) You can use your content site to gather PR for your affiliate site.

2) It could be good in terms of LocalRank if you link the pages between the sites right. Not certain LocalRank's in play, but it's a good thing to do for the future anyway.

3) You can generate revenue from your content sites as you build rankings and traffic.

I plan to produce a cooking or kitchen related content site to gather PR for my AWS sites. I'm also in the middle of producing another content and affiliate site that runs off of a datafeed (not AWS this time!).