To a non-affiliate marketer describing in the pub what we do is often a difficult process! In short we deliver customers to web sites and are paid a commission when we get a sale. We do this mainly in the following ways.
Direct to merchant PPC
With direct to merchant PPC we write adverts for search engines (notably Google Adwords), enter keywords, then deliver targetted traffic to merchants’ web sites.
Landing Pages
Sometimes merchants won’t allow affiliate marketers to deliver customers direct to their web sites. In these cases we build a mini-web site with a landing page that then directs customers to one or more merchants. These sites have to “add value” to the user so will often incorporate some form of product review or price comparison.
SEO and PPC
Traffic is everything when you are an affiliate marketer, and targetted traffic at that. We obtain traffic via pay-per-click (principally Google Adwords) and search engine optimisation of web sites we own.
E-mail Marketing
We are also working on building a list of e-mail addresses from subscribers to some of our sites. These customers can then be e-mailed with appropriate offers that take them either to our own sites, or direct to merchants sites.