What is a landing page?

A landing page is where you direct traffic to.  The page is usually just that, one single page website with information about the product you are trying to promote with your affiliate link on the page.

People visit your landing page, read your information and click through to the sellers page to learn about more information, and/or make their purchase.

Some people think that instead of spending time and money developing a landing page you could just send traffic to the sellers site with your affiliate link.  While you could use your affiliate link when commenting on a blog or in a directory submission, you are setting yourself up for problems.
Others use a squidoo page or a hubpages page, or articles as their landing page.  Again, trying to save a little money is only going to cost you more money in the end.

You want to maintain control of your traffic.  You want to send your traffic to your own site, then decide what to do with that traffic.

Let’s say you are promoting a weight loss product and you are sending traffic directly to the seller.  Suddenly the seller closes up shop, now your sending traffic to a dead link.  If you send people to your own landing page focusing on weight loss, now if a seller dissapears, you can switch your affiliate link on your landing page to a new product.  Sure you could do this on your hundreds of articles, but doing it once on your page is much simpler and you won’t accidently miss something.

If you are using pay per click to get traffic, usually you can’t use your affiliate link, so you will need a landing page.

Your landing page should include your own content about the product.  You could explain how you use and enjoy the product, you could present an unbiased review of the product, you could compare several products, etc.

Landing pages are an important part of affiliate marketing, and every guru marketer uses them.