Do you promote the merchant or their products?

[David Tan]

What's more effective, promoting a banner targeting the company or a banner targeting a specific product?

Unless the company's brand is really powerful, it won't have the impact of a targeted product matching a related content/product review/article.

Utlizing datafeeds, your ads can be higly specific and highly related to your article.

Check the banners your merchant provides you. If it isn't targeted enough, consider making your own using their datafeed.

[marketraise2007]

When you are advertising an affiliate program or promoting a service or product of a host to a customer,don't give the website address of the host to the customer.The reason is simple.Say for instance a host has a couple of products to be sold or service to be utilized.You are handed over the responsibility to advertise a product or service from the list and you promote it to the customer.If the customer feels unsatisfied by the performance of the service ,he complains to you as you are the lead.So you have another option to promote the remaining product.Where as if the customer has the web address of the host he goes to the webpage and finds out every thing and does the communication himself and you loose both the leads.
Hence it is important that the customer and host are unaware of each others presence.