An independent field guide
An independent reference for affiliate marketers and media buyers: niches, traffic sources, methods and tools, each explained and connected, so you can see how a campaign fits together from the offer to the tracker.
Start with a nicheBrowse the tools directory
Read first: a complete niche guide
Health and beauty products such as supplements and creams, sold through affiliate offers, often cash on delivery, in many countries.
The Silk Road was never a single highway. It was a web of routes between markets: what was carried, who wanted it, which road it took and what the caravan needed to arrive.
A campaign is built the same way. An offer in a niche, a traffic source that reaches the buyers, a method that ties them together and the tools that carry the load. This site maps each of those pieces and the routes between them.
Paid ads on Facebook and Instagram through Meta’s ad platform: precise targeting, strict ad policies, frequent account bans.
Ads styled as recommended articles in widgets on news and content sites, bought per click from native ad networks.
Unpaid visits from search results, earned by useful pages and links rather than bids, and the base of affiliate review sites.
Popunder and popup traffic that opens an advertiser page in a new window, bought cheaply per thousand views with high bot risk.
Short notification-style ads delivered to browser users who subscribed to push messages, bought per click or per impression.
Discipline
Search engine optimisation for review and comparison sites that earn commission, within Google rules on thin content and link spam.
Business model
Promoting another company’s product and earning a commission for each lead or sale you send, usually through a network.
Discipline
Recording clicks and conversions and tying each sale back to the campaign, placement and lander that produced it.
Self-serve platforms where affiliates buy push, pop, native and other traffic by the click or by the thousand impressions.
Software that records every click and conversion so you know which campaign, placement and lander actually made money.
Browsers that keep many isolated profiles with separate fingerprints; explained here, never recommended through affiliate links.
Networks that connect affiliates with advertisers, supply offers and tracking links, and pay out for approved leads or sales.
Tools and template libraries for building the prelanders and landing pages that sit between the ad and the offer.
Software for keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking and site audits, used to plan and grow organic search traffic.
Ad intelligence services that show which creatives, landers and offers competitors are running on a traffic source.