Can You Make Money With PPC And Direct Linking?

It doesn't matter, Tom.

Because even if you can, it would make no sense to try, when you look at the alternatives.

Here's the thing: to earn significant money from affiliate marketing, you need to do three things ...

(i) Keep your potential customers returning to the sales page (because very, very few people buy anthing much at their first visit to its sales page!);

(ii) Make increasing sales (ideally at progressively higher prices) to the same "captive audience" who regularly rely on and trust your recommendations;

(iii) Establish the credibility and trust necessary to do both the above by earning's people respect as a provider of niche-related information.

Without building lists, of course, you can't do any of the three and you'd just be throwing away almost all the traffic you ever generate that doesn't buy anything immediately.

It's like trying to fill the bath by opening the taps fully but without remembering to put the plug in the hole first. You just lose almost all the water, almost immediately. Even if you did, occasionally, have enough left over to show a profit, what kind of way to run a business would that be?

For most people, most of the time, it's just about as simple as that, overall.

These three threads are more informative ...

Is it a good idea to spend some time on building a mailing list ?

Without Building a List, How Consistent is Your Income from Affiliate Marketing

Does anyone even make money online without an email list?

And quite apart from all that, if it were as easy for ClickBank vendors - say - as "doing PPC advertising and direct-linking to their sales page", why would they all be paying affiliates up to 75% of the takings for providing the traffic? Why wouldn't they just do that, themselves, or employ someone to do it, and earn so much more money??


Yes indeed ... you certainly got that part right. That would be very silly. That's why affiliates don't need sales pages. We need opt-in pages.


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Thanks alexa for the great advise (as always).

I guess I really need to start figuring out how to build lists. I always went the PPC route because I can afford to put money into it and hoped that would cut the time issue of having to build a list. I am new to IM and have just about figured out how to put a website up let alone auto responders and the like.

Im guessing I will need thousands and thousands of people on my list to make any money? That sounds like years of work :-(

no iwould never direct link. collect your leads and keep them for you self. besides many networks will not let you direct link. even face book.

You can direct link your offers and can get success but its better to use landing page, IMO.

You absolutely CAN direct link if you use a meta refresh, depending on the traffic platform of course. The only way to find out if you can make money doing it, is to test out direct linking an offer(s) against sending the traffic to a landing page/website/etc. For platforms that don't tolerate direct linking or redirects, a simple landing page works. Even a image-based lander can work well.

Some offers won't do well direct linked, while some will. It's all a matter of sending enough traffic volume to each variation to see which one converts the most.

You can make a landing page that looks very similar to the offer's lander, without all of the "bells and whistles." Then have a simple call-to-action link or button that takes the visitor to the sales page. You can even test linking to the sales page vs. linking to the checkout page (if the advertiser allows it), to see which converts best.

I sometimes make a simple version of the offer's site by duplicating the offer page and stripping out most of the text, then placing a few good selling points in bullets with a call-to-action button underneath. Works well. And I always test an offer direct linking first, before building and testing a landing page or website, but of course that may not work for everyone.

In my experience so far, PPC is 1% intuition and 99% testing!