Ok, so when I posted that I made a few bucks a while back, I did. But, now over time, it's not averaging out well. I'm bummed.

After reading a few other articles, I've been hearing a great debate happening over direct clicks to the offer using PPC, whether it works well or not.

I'm sure it depends on a lot of things, but what has been your experience? So far, none of my direct link campaigns have worked out.

I would absolutely spend some time setting up some landing pages, I know uberaffiliate normally direct links at first, and then if it makes just a little bit of money he setups a landing page.

Sometimes you just need a landing page to make money, because if 50 other people are all direct linking to the same domain name, it is hard to get placement on your advertisement and really get traffic to compete. But if you have your own landing page, then everyone else direct linking is still pointing to the original domain, while you have a unique landing page now you are linking to. So it makes it easier to rank because your no longer competing for position (with people who have duplicate display urls)

Yea, I understand the reason he does that and it seems to make sense to me, especially as a newbie. Spending a bunch of time up front building a landing page for these could be a huge waste of time/money if the offer sucks.

The big question is how do you know if the offer sucks or not if you don't try it out? Any tips on that? If I had ways of knowing whether it was a good campaign or not before doing anything else, I'd definitely spend time on the landing pages.

I generally spend $100, in testing money, at first, to see whether or not the campaign is good or not. Instead of say, I'll test for 7 days. I say, I'll spend $100, and see if we got something here.

So you do direct link before you create landing pages then?

Yeah, almost all the time, first, if it makes some commissions I start setting up some landing pages (and then once that landing page makes money) I'll also setup like 3-5 more landing pages too.

Ah, ok, that makes sense.

1) Direct linking works good when there is a cap on

a certain offer. Say only 100 leads permitted by the advertiser.

If you direct link, there are less clicks a person

needs to do to reach the offer page especially if one\'s

landing page might not even help the sale and there are little click thrus to the offer.

Meaning, fast and furiously, check the merchant page is \"sexay\" and worth direct linking to, monitor the campaign, grab the 100 leads, get in and out with your money before other affiliates start hopping on the bandwagon.

For direct linking ideas, hv shared some \"grey\" hat direct linking tips in this forum.

This is short term, but you could make some quick cash this way.

2) The long term way...

If you build a list of people that are interested in that

product,you could grab, say out of a 100 lead cap, majority of leads by sending out just 1 email.

this could require a little communication between an affiliate and the affiliate manager so we know what new offers might be coming out, and start the list building campaign sooner, before the $1.50 bidding wars start.

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