I’m learning how to build a whole bunch of “autopilot” small, niche websites to make money online, and it’s pretty interesting.

I’m going to sound like a total newbie to anyone with experience who is reading this, but I was totally unaware of how to use affiliate data feeds until just two days ago. The concept is really very cool, and really takes a lot of the “how can I possibly find time to do this?” out of the whole thing.

So you know what an affiliate program is, right? You promote someone else’s stuff and if people buy based on your referral, you get a commission. It’s one of the big ways that people make money online. And you know how to use affiliate programs, right? You put products up and set the links. The trick is that it can be tedious to manage. First, you have to find products. Then you have to put them on your site and link them up. You have to update them. It’s not a matter of how to use affiliate programs; it’s a matter of how to do it without breaking a sweat.

You may sell a few things, but probably not a huge amount unless you spend a fortune on Google Adwords and/or are a genius. And if you only sell a little bit, you give up. It’s hard to duplicate more sites because of all of the work involved.

But that’s where feeds come in. By using a data feed service, it will update the store for you. It’s literally a handful of clicks: you choose the affiliate networks you want to draw from, and then the individual merchants. You search for products by keyword, price, whatever. Then you generate the store and it’s up, completely stocked with masked affiliate links and masked affiliate image URLs. It looks like you’re selling the products, but when someone clicks a link, they’re taken to the real merchant… and if they buy, you get a piece of that.

A lot depends on how you set things up, but there are easy ways to integrate live posts with the feed, how to “drip” new feed entries into the blog so it looks to visitors and search engines like a real blog, and so on.