To Direct Link or Not To Direct Link?

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Josh Todd

It’s one of the oldest questions in Affiliate Marketing: to direct link or not to direct link? Google made their stance on the issue pretty clear when they all but banned direct linking on AdWords. Now they don’t even like so-called “bridge pages” which lead to affiliate offers with little content on them.

But still, traffic sources such as Facebook and PPV still allow for direct linking. I get asked almost every single day whether you should direct link a campaign or create a landing page for it. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast answer. The truth is (and has always been) that some campaigns work better direct linked and some work better with landing pages. Neither method works better all of the time. You need to test it out.

That being said, a strategy that I have seen work well for affiliates is to direct link a campaign to quickly evaluate whether or not it has potential before they go to the trouble of building out a landing page. Especially if it is in a brand new niche that you have not promoted before, where you don’t have any creatives or landers sitting around ready to be used.

It’s easy to throw together a direct link campaign on PPV or Facebook. Run some traffic to it, and if you are getting enough conversions to break even, or even just under, it’s a good sign that the offer has some life to it. That’s when you can buckle down and put together a landing page to bring the ROI into the black and start making money.

The Campaign Is Over, What Now?

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Josh Todd

When you’ve got a hot campaign rolling, it’s the best feeling in the biz. You are making money. Your hard work is paying off. Time to take it easy and spend some money right? Wrong! That’s what you might be tempted to do, but in fact it’s time to buckle down. Sooner or later you are going to get that dreaded email from your network: “The offer is paused”. But how could this happen?!? It happens to every campaign sooner or later. If you are lucky, there are other offers in the niche that you can switch over to. With ringtones, for example, there are always a bunch of different offers to test against each other. But if you are in something very specialized, then you might not be so lucky. So since you need to get the gears turning again, let’s see what we can do to find the next campaign.

1. Ask your AMs for Advice

Affiliate Managers can be a huge asset to you when you are open to new ideas. They will be far more helpful when you approach them looking for suggestions. They don’t just want to sit there all day pushing offers to non-interested affiliates. Put them to work! Tell them what you’ve been running. Not everything of course, but tell them what offers are working so that they can give you more suggestions.

2. Test, test, test

This is where you put all of your inhibitions aside and try out things that you were too scared to try before you had some success. You’ve had at least one successful campaign already, so there is nothing stopping you from doing it again. You would be surprised how many of the most profitable campaigns came from things that marketers just tried on a whim, not thinking that they would be successful. You can never predict what’s going to hit and what’s not. Be a little more creative, think outside the box, try it out!

3. Find new Traffic Sources

There are so many traffic sources out there you would have a full time job just trying to test them all. This might be a good time to try your hand at one or two new ones and see how they work. You never know, maybe something about it will open up a whole new niche or campaign for you that had previously stumped you. Different platforms have different targeting options and possibilities for you to exploit. This ties back in to #2: be creative with your Traffic Sources as well!

4. Analyze your success

What was it about that successful campaign that made it a winner? At what point did you really break through? Was it profitable from the beginning or did you have to tweak it? Did you use a landing page or direct link? Where did you hear about that campaign? Did you think it was going to be successful when you tried it? Asking yourself these questions will bring you to some very interesting answers. A lot of times you will completely forget how you actually stumbled onto a profitable campaign and just how easy it was to do. There wasn’t anything magical about it. In most cases you were just following a simple process of testing and exploring that led to a profit. The good news is, this can be repeated!

The Six Sigma DMAIC Method applies to our industry perfectly

This should all encourage you to put yourself out there and try new things. The best part of being your own boss in this business is that you can do whatever you want! Try new campaigns, try more of the same campaigns, try anything that strikes your fancy. Just make sure that when your hit campaign dries up, you will still have a paycheck at the end of the month.

Size Matters: PPV Landing Page Dimensions

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Josh Todd

As I’ve written about before, you need to get their attention in 4 seconds or less when you are doing PPV. A huge part of this has to do with your landing page. If you are direct linking, you need to pay special attention when selecting offers to make sure that the call to action and all the pertinent info is appearing in the viewable area of the pop-up browser window. If it’s not, there is very little chance the users are going to scroll down just to see what the deal is. If you are building landing pages, you have absolute control over the size and appearance of your page. This is probably the #1 reason that people make landing pages for PPV, besides getting people more excited and getting them clicking.

One question I get all the time is how big to make your pages. It’s common knowledge that the pop-ups generated by PPV software are an 800×600 window. But does that mean that you should design an 800×600 page? The answer is NO. I grabbed screenshots of some actual pop-ups spawned on my two favorite PPV Networks, TrafficVance and Lead Impact. I’ve diagrammed them below so that you can see exactly what is going on.

Lead Impact Pop-Up Window

Click Image for Full Scale Version

TrafficVance Pop-Up Window

Click Image for Full Scale Version

First we have the actual browser window, which is definitely 800×600. However, that measures from the outside of the window. The actual viewable area is much smaller. As you can see below, the TrafficVance window has 35 more pixels of height to work with in the viewable area than the Lead Impact window does. This is because of the extra space that the Hotbar toolbar takes up in the Lead Impact window. Is it retarded that Lead Impact leaves the Hotbar app in the window that it pops? Yes. It’s the stupidest thing ever. But that’s the way it is. Weird thing is, when I took the screenshot, the Hotbar magically disappeared from the picture. It just shows up as a blank toolbar. Interesting…

Not only does TrafficVance have a larger true viewable area, the Adware Disclaimer is also a lot smaller. It’s just in the bottom left corner of the screen instead of a big blue bar all the way across the bottom like Lead Impact has. The other major factor to keep in mind when comparing these networks is that TrafficVance only pops a maximum of 4 windows per day. On the other hand, Lead Impact will pop on almost every single website that you visit. This gets really annoying, even for me while I was doing the testing. I can’t imagine how people leave it installed on their computer all the time…

So there you have it. I always find that when going into battle (and marketing is a battle), it helps to have the best intelligence you can. Now you know exactly what dimensions to design your landing pages in, or to double check that your direct link offers fit into.

Pro Tip: If you want a really easy way to measure how large the landing page is for your affiliate offer, just download ScreenHunter Free and set it to “Rectangular Area” in the “Capture What” menu. Then hit whatever key you setup to be your capture key (I use PrintScreen), a box will appear around your mouse that zooms in the detail. Just click and drag to highlight the landing page and it will tell you the dimensions. If you want to go ahead and capture the screenshot, just let go of the mouse button. If you don’t want the screenshot, just right-click before you let go of the left mouse button.

Uber Pro Tip: ScreenHunter is only for PC users. But Mac users don’t need it because they already have that same function built-in to OSX. Just press Command + Shift + 4 then you will be able to use the same type of rectangular box to measure your page.

How To Direct Link On Google – Part 2

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Josh Todd

My last post has generated a lot of response and questions from people, so I wanted to discuss a couple of other points about the method that I outlined in Part 1.

First of all, there is the question of whether this method could get you banned from Google AdWords. I would consider this a gray-area technique. It’s not something that is an instant ban, but if you exploit it to a huge degree, then yes, it could lead to your account being terminated.

The reason that I posted this method is that it can be a great way to test out a campaign, but I can’t stress enough that you should be building landing pages for offers that have proven successful with the direct link method. It is very hard to build a long-term, sustainable business on the internet without creating a website.

Second, some people have questioned the ethics of using another site that doesn’t belong to you as the display URL. The easiest response there is, if you don’t feel comfortable doing it, then don’t do it. An alternative to using someone’s website is that you can use a domain that you own as the Display and Destination URL to get your ad approved, then switch the link to your affiliate link with Edit Keyword Settings like I suggested. This way you don’t have to spend the time to build out a full dedicated landing page, but you are still using your own domain so you won’t get any complaints from other webmasters or feel bad about doing it.

I would also like to stress that the tutorials that I publish on this blog are not meant to be the absolute blueprint to success with affiliate marketing. There is no such blueprint. The goal with this blog is to give you, the reader, some good tips & advice to get going with some campaigns and marketing methods, and then you can tweak them and customize them to find what works the best for you.

There is a lot of money to be made in this industry, and it’s not always going to be easy. It’s a lot easier than working 60 hours a week in a job that you hate to bring home just enough to keep the bill collectors at bay though… Anything with the kind of potential that you have as an affiliate marketer is going to take some time to become successful at, but the rewards are definitely worth the effort that you put in.

That being said, I will continue to offer more strategies and tutorials, and I will do my best to answer your questions & comments to steer you in the right direction. So keep reading, and keep the feedback coming!

How To Direct Link On Google

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Josh Todd

Direct linking on Google is a very popular way to test out affiliate offers to see how they convert before you devote the time to building a landing page. To get started, you need to login to your Google AdWords account and start a new campaign. You want to start a New Campaign with Keywords, not Placements.

Be sure to choose the proper country for the offer that you are promoting. Google recently threw a monkey wrench into the works by setting the default countries to “United States and Canada”. A lot of CPA offers will only accept traffic from one or the other, not both. So pick your country and move on.

Creating your first ad will be the next step. An ad consists of a Headline, 2 Description lines, a Display URL, and a Destination URL. Go ahead and create a catchy headline and a descriptive ad containing a call to action, you want to get people to click on your ad now, not next week or next year.

The Display URL is an important step, and this is where we are going to trick Google into thinking that you already have a website built out for your offer. Just do a normal Google search for your main keyword and pick a URL from one of the sites that appears in the organic (non-sponsored) links. Make sure that the URL is not also advertised in the Sponsored Links on the right side of the page, because if it is, this trick won’t work. Copy the URL and paste it into the Display URL box.

Now that you’ve got your Display URL, you want to use the exact same URL for your Destination URL. I know what you are thinking, “But wait, how will I get paid for sending traffic to a site that isn’t mine?”. Fear not, we are going to fix that in the next step. This is just to get Google to approve your ad and hopefully assign you with a decent Quality Score.

So at this point your ad should look something like this:

Next you will choose your Keywords and enter your Daily Budget and CPC (Cost Per Click) bids. Keyword generation and selection is a topic for an entire discussion in itself, so I will just advise you to do your research before hand and have some keywords to get started with before you setup your campaign. Google’s Free Keyword Tool is an excellent place to start.

We are almost done. Go ahead and review everything and hit Save Campaign. Now we need to do the final step to direct the traffic to your affiliate link instead of the website that you are using for your display URL. Once you have saved the campaign, you will be taken to the campaign overview screen. Click on the Keywords tab, and then check the box to select all of your keywords. Once you have them all selected, click the Edit Keyword Settings button.

This will take you to a screen where you can input a new Destination URL for each keyword. Go ahead and put your affiliate link into the first field, then hit the little down arrow button, this should copy the URL into all of the keywords for you. So, for example, if your affiliate link is http://login.tracking101.com/ez/aasldkfjd (not a real link), it should look something like this:

UPDATE: Make sure that you remove the http:// from your affiliate link when you put it into this Destination URL box, because it will give you an Illegal Characters In URL error if you don’t. There is a drop-down box to the left of where you put the link in that lets you select http:// or https:// for a secure affiliate link. It defaults to http:// which is what most networks use.

Then just hit Save Changes, and you are good to go. Congratulations, now you know how to get a direct-linked campaign approved on Google.

Now go make some money!

Inside Affiliate

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