This episode of Affiliate ABCs focuses on the changing rules for the Direct to Merchant (DTM) Pay per Click (PPC) strategy that many affiliates have been using for several years. Major merchants like Amazon and EBay recently said that they will no longer allow affiliates to use the merchant site as their landing pages in PPC campaigns. What this means is that affiliates that never built websites now need to learn how to do so and how to make landing pages that convert.
Guest Kelly Gillease talks with host Deborah Carney on how this practice has been used and why affiliates should have been sending the traffic direct to their own websites all along. And more importantly, how those affiliates can modify their practices to change with the new requirements.
SEMCast with Kelly Gillease
Follow Kelly on Twitter
Kelly’s Blog
Follow Loxly on Twitter
Team Loxly
In this podcast Viator Affiliate Manager Deborah Carney and Viator Marketing Director Kelly Gillease talk about how affiliates can leverage the travel market on their websites. Whether your affiliate site focuses on travel or not, you can successfully promote travel merchants, including hotels, airlines, tours and aggregators like Expedia. Gardening sites, family sites and especially bargain oriented sites can benefit from promoting travel products in the current economy. To quote Kelly “People are not planning to stay home, they are still going to travel.”
Some areas to focus on are the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, before and after since the hotels are adding capacity and will be offering deals to get them filled and a surprising popular travel destination is Iceland. Their currency has fallen in value so there are deals there to take advantage of.
You can also hear Kelly at her own podcast SEMcast over at GeekCast.fm.
Be sure to follow Deborah and Kelly on Twitter and visit their blogs:
Inhouse SEM (Kelly)
Team Loxly (Deborah)
And listen to our Viator Merchant Spotlight Podcast if you missed it 
More information about the Viator Affiliate Program
Today’s edition of Affiliate ABCs is a little different. Hosted by Deborah Carney with guest Kelly Gillease, the Marketing Director for Viator.com. As part of Affiliate ABCs we want to do some Merchant Spotlights, where affiliates can learn how to best promote a specific merchant. Our first merchant is one that we are very familiar with, Team Loxly has been managing the Viator Travel and Tours Affiliate Program for a year and they recently moved to the Shareasale network and relaunched. Many affiliates ask how is the best way to promote Viator and want to know how to include them in their sites, so that inspired us to do this podcast.
Let us know if this is beneficial to you and let us know which merchants you want us to interview in future podcasts!
Links:
Viator Affiliate Support Forum at ABestWeb
Team Loxly Viator Program Information
Viator.com
Sign up for Viator at Shareasale.com
