You can’t run ads that go straight to an affiliate link in affiliate marketing, and you shouldn’t just be sending your affiliate link or main product link, for those who are product creators, to anyone. The goal of the landing page is to keep people in your catalog, so to speak, as leads. That’s the purpose of a landing page, and it should be the first thing anyone sees.
Landing pages are usually short and simple, although they can include a brief sales letter. The main attraction of a landing page is the giveaway, however. Most successful marketers don’t actually market their core products directly when fishing for cold leads, which are merely people who haven’t encountered you before and don’t have a previous customer relationship with you. You start the process of warming them up by offering them something free and valuable enough to establish trust.
What you offer for free is called a lead magnet. It can be an ebook (or a physical book, if you can afford it), report, cheat sheet, video, webinar, or anything else. The only requirement is that it be valuable because if it’s not, your lead won’t be impressed and the effect of the rest of the funnel will be dampened. It’s also difficult to run ads for a product that looks, say, like something copy-and-pasted off the Internet.
