CPA offers question from newbie ..please help!

Well the number one reason why you would want to use your own landing page is for your own benefit. A custom landing page is unique to you, allows you to tweak and optimize for best possible conversions. And this also differentiates you from your competitors.

Your landing page (also known as a jump page) is the page you will initially send your traffic to so that you can "presell" your prospects before sending them to the actual offer page. This can be in the form of a sales page, squeeze page or article or blog post. And you would definitely need to have a clear call to action somewhere on your landing page. Your call to action can be either an optin form (highly recommended when possible, especially in competitive niches) or some kind of big button that says something like "Click Here To Check Out XYZ" that hyperlinks to the actual offer page.

That's all a landing page is meant to do, but can surely make a dramatic difference in your income when done properly.

But the reason some offers require you to use your own landing page is because they are being cautious, especially if they are new to a specific affiliate network. And what I mean by this is, some affiliates promote offers using unethical methods, such as spamming emails, posting on classified sites when it said not to, or even spamming the links on social media sites.

If affiliates are direct linking, email providers, classified sites and social media sites are going to see where these link are pointing to, then ban/blacklist the website from their platform. And a lot of companies are purposely avoiding this from happening to their website. Hopefully that makes sense. It's surely one of the main reasons they require affiliates to send all their traffic to their own landing page first before linking to their offer.

And generally, it's never a traffic source such as Google or Bing that prohibits direct linking to a specific offer. This depends on if the offer meets their editorial guidelines, such as if it have entry/exit popups, scripts, tracking or malware, then they will not let you direct link in your ad. Other reasons can be that their URL or your tracking link from your CPA network is already blacklisted (which is very common). Another reason could be that a specific company has their name or URL trademarked, which you then wouldn't be able to use in your ads.

Nich blog? What's it? And what does it do? Or its benefit?

A landing page may not specifically be a squeeze page capturing the user's email, many times it also pre-selling the CPA offer. If you are good at marketing this pre-selling can help increase your conversions a lot, so most marketers recommend using them. Not to make it sound intimating, anyone can make them really.

They work great. I good idea would be keep a look out on your favorite traffic sources for some examples, eventually you'll start noticing good examples... and it will click. You'll see how useful a good presell can be. You've probably been sold by a landing page might of not even noticed.