Does Direct Linking Still Work?
April 9th, 2008 by 
Amit
You know, there’s a lot of affiliate out there telling people that direct linking no longer works, and that they shouldn’t waste their time with it.
I was one of these affiliate.
But in the paste several months I’ve come full circle.
Here’s some success stories :
- I meet two guys at Yanik’s Underground. One guy is NETTING $50k/month with all direct linking campaigns. Another guy is making $100k in revenues a month with direct linking (with HIGH ROI).
- One of my students is netting $1000-$1300/day profit from just 3 direct linking campaigns he launched. He used the strategies I taught him combined with some genius insight into what markets to promote.
- Another one of my students is netting $500/day profit - her first big success, following the EXACT strategies I laid out in my coaching program and in this post.
Also, I’ve just recently launched a direct linking campaign, it’s already profitable, and continues to quickly grow as I split test my ads and add more keywords.
The biggest advantage of direct linking is that it allows you to quickly test a market without a huge invest of your time. No matter how much market research you do, quickly testing lots of affiliate offers is really the best way to find the big winners.
So if you’re struggling to make landing pages, I recommend that you FIRST do direct linking and get 10-20 campaigns going.
You can easily launch 5-10 campaigns a week if you’re focus and disciplined.
Once you find a big winner, reinvest your profits into hiring a decent web designer and writer to build you a site. Once you have a real site up, your traffic will go WAAAY UP!
And so will your profits! 
The biggest drawback to direct linking is that you’ll only get about 20% impression share (in most cases), however, this problem is easily solved with your own site.
Many of you have been asking for case studies, I’ll be doing several case studies in the beginning of May showing some concrete examples, so stay tuned!
affiliate marketing strategies affiliate success stories direct linking
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Super Affiliate Mindset, affiliate marketing | 
Amit,
Thanks for the great post! Where is some good information for “correctly” setting up a good direct linking campaign? You have mentioned before that direct linking works IF you do it the right way.
Thanks,
Fred
Yes, I personally know that direct linking does work. Of course, other methods are more profitable. But direct linking is great to use until you build a landing page and as an initial test of ROI.
Since Google has a new policy on display URL’s in regards to landing pages, do you use iframes? Or do you just use a php script for a redirect?
“The biggest drawback to direct linking is that you’ll only get about 20% impression share (in most cases)…”
Can you explain what you mean by this? Is this if the merchant and other affiliates are direct linking too?
Hi Amit
i would like to buy the dvs from Yanik’s Underground just to see the Jim and Mike presentation, ¿they shared stories o strategies too???
Thanks for addressing this!
Amit,
How do we learn more about your coaching program? I don’t see any links on your blog for it.
Thanks.
Thanks for the post Amit. I also like the original article on direct linking that you mentioned. I only have a limited experience with adwords, but it’s something I’m planning on looking into in the near future.
- Dave
Hi Amit
What do you mean by 20% impression share?
Thanks
By 20% share I think he means that the linked advertiser’s ads and other people direct linking to the same page will show the other 80% of time, since Google will not allow 2 ads with the same display url show up on the same page.
Btw Amit, have you ever run into this problem, where you have the entire campaign setup, but when you launch, you realize that the advertisers landing page has been slapped with bad Q/s? What do you then?
That’s right, impression share is the percent of time your ad actually shows up when competing with other ad with the same destination URL.
Yes, sometimes you’ll get slapped the minute you put a campaign up and with direct linking you should count on the fact that a percentage of the sites you launch will get slapped.
If you focus promoting merchants that have substantial sites, then your changes of getting slapped go way down.
Actually I’m just starting with PPC and my first direct linking campaign doesn’t seem to be a success. I think I will re-read your blog before starting the next one.
SO if the site is slapped, do you just drop that campaign or direct linking to that advertiser?
OK, but Google has a new URL policy that makes it virtually impossible to direct link to websites, especially if the URL looks like http://www.emjcd.com…SO, how do we work around that?
Thanks.
What do you mean with the impression share 20 %? As far as I know the advertiser with best QS will get almost 100% of the impressions and others none.
I have a question: Lets say 2 ads in different accounts have the same display URL - which one will be shown? The one that pays more per click?
I have the same question as Hyder: how do you work around google´s new URL policy?
I have been looking in to doing redirects but since I´m just getting started in PPC I don´t know how to go about it.
Do you make a basic landing page at the beggining of the campaign so google approves your ads and URLs and keeps a decent QS and then redirect?
Hi amit,
do you do article marketing as well to drive traffic to your site?
I heard direct linking works well with Google Content Site…
How true is that Amit?
Regards,
Ivan Ong
http://ivan-ong.com
An Affiliate Blog
“The biggest drawback to direct linking is that you’ll only get about 20% impression share (in most cases), however, this problem is easily solved with your own site”
Hi Amir,
I don’t get what you meant when you said “…this problem is easily solved with your own site”
I thought you were talking about Direct Linking, which doesn’t involve any in-between webpages whatsoever?
Why then did you talk about getting your own site up, which I would assume would be the landing page?
Appreciate lots if u could be a little bit more specific
Thanks Amir!
Unless you are talking about setting up a “redirect” but Google has banned that on 1st April already am I right?
I do direct linking as well and I made close to 2k on one campaign with just direct linking…. before I decide on direct linking I usually look at the landing page and see if it is feasible and if googel likes it - not sure if google will like it right away but I have to test right
but direct linking is far easier than landing page creation - I prefer it most of the time and ask my AM to shed some light on it as well asking direct questions on who and how many and its epc etc
Amit,
How does one become one of “your students?”
Amit,
You talk about coaching program all the time. Where do we find info on it? How do I join and What do I need to join the program? Mind you I’m not new affiliate marketing and joining your program can help scale my efforts.
Gagan
Guys.. The new Adwords URL policy has nothing to do with redirects.. read this: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/02/update-to-display-url-policy.html
Especially this part:
We do understand that many advertisers utilize tracking URLs within the destination field of their ads. Therefore, if the URL of your landing page matches that of your display URL, your ads will be approved.
For example:
Display URL: http://www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: http://www.trackingurl.com/google123
–> Landing page URL: http://www.google.com would be acceptable
Hi Amit,
Iam using direct linking it’s easy to test different niches very quickly and it’s helpful if you are planning to do a information product. It’s also the profitable way to test a market, rather than stuffs such as surveys, etc.
There are over 30,000 clickbank products, and some of them need to be worth doing a DL campaign, there are numerous niches where people are spending more money. So, it works for me, iam testing a lot of market and so far it’s been profitable, and most of the time iam the only one promoting the product. When more people are promotign the same product i get a seperate page for me from the vendor in some case a seperate subdomain. Hope it helps.
jes.
Hi Amit,
Same question as the others - do you offer a coaching program?
Joshua discussed the “problem” with direct linking and Googles new policy. He cited an excerpt from Googles own policy about redirects that essentially says that it is OK as long as the VERY FINAL destination is the URL that is also a display URL.
I am not saying that I don’t believe you Joshua (I haven’t read the whole document) but I have to say that Google support staff told me that they don’t like redirects.
I am a web developer and I was launching a campaign for my client but his website URL was too long to put in the display URL field, so I have to contact the support. I told them I can do a redirect from his shorter URL but they said they don’t like that. So eventually I got approved for some exception where my display URL isn’t exactly the same as the destination URL, but no redirects are in use.
So I don’t know what Google really wants :)) but I thought I would share this experience with you.
Also, the policy says it applies for “new ads”, thus I assume that if you have older ads running that don’t complay then you are OK (but only until you edit them).
Amit,
Thanks Man!
I just tried direct linking on another merchant and I have been up all night long because its converting and my clicks are super cheap I wish I would of tested other offers awhile back. I have another offer I’m promoting, but it just seems very expensive which my CPC cost is going down for that merchant, but it’s taking a lot of spending optimization.
But check this out I jumped into this other merchant direct link and it was like this one was super easy compared to the other one I’m paying cheaper on my clicks, but the pay out on the merchant site is high.
@Rafeal - Google requires landing page URL to be the same as display URL (at least the TLD), so they don’t allow redirects from display & destination url such as yourdomain.com to merchant.com
@frand - the one with higher bid
@affiliate dominator - yes, you’re right on google ban on redirect. and I think the reason why amit brought up having your own site in this post is b/c he was mentioning the drawback of direct link. so to counter that drawback is having your own site. nothng else can be done.
@ianternet - I really want to do direct linking and in fact been searching a lot of merchants that allow direct linking (i mostly use CJ). However, what I found is most merchants don’t allow affiliates use trademarks in display URL, that in essence means NO direct linking. Please correct me if I’m wrong, if I put affiliate tracking URL in the destination URL and this goes to merchant.com, but I put any URL other than merchant.com in display, this act is banned by google and other search engines as well, isn’t it.
@joshua - googles does banned redirects, you can find out from their editorial guide. I think you have missed one point, that is when we say redirect in direct link PPC, it refers to redirect your destination URL, so it will be a different landing page URL than the actually display URL you put for the ad.