Should You Drive Traffic Directly To Merchants’ Pages?

That’s the main question many beginner affiliates have to wrestle with. Let’s say you want to promote an insurance offer. Do you build your own page and then redirect people to the merchant’s site, or do you just buy Google Adwords traffic and direct them to the merchant’s site?

The latter is really what was called Google Cash method a few years ago. In essence, in the dark times of the Internet you could buy traffic and send it to the merchant site and try to achieve search arbitrage. But Google has really come down hard on people who try Google cash. First, you simply can’t use the same display URL as the merchant as only one URL is allowed. Second, many networks such as Clickbank limit you on what you can do with Google Adwords. Besides, a lot of merchants protect themselves from you bidding on their main terms, so you are going to be stuck with less quality terms to bid on the same landing page.

The goal of an affiliate marketer should be to drive traffic to the merchant and at the same time retain people who have been referred to the merchant with her investment. You can’t achieve that with direct Google cash method. However, if you have your own landing page with a newsletter box to collect your audience’s contact information, you can go back to them and sell them complementary products in the future. Even if you were to pull off the Google cash method, you would still be better off with your own landing page. So the sooner you get started on that, the better.