Now that you’ve conducted your research into your niche, narrowed down some offers, the next stage is deciding whether to direct link to the offer or drive the traffic to your own page. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each approach.

Note: This is a continuing series of affiliate marketing educational posts, if you haven’t yet, you can start at the beginning of the series.

Direct Linking: Involves linking to the merchant/advertisers page.

I’ve known some new affiliates who literally link to the merchant’s signup page (without going through their affiliate URL). Think about this for a moment, if you’re sending traffic to the offer signup page, and it’s not being tracked to your affiliate account, how’re you going to get paid?

The one key you need to figure out is make sure your affiliate ID is embedded in the URL you’re sending traffic to.

Having said that, some experienced marketers frown on direct linking. The reason being that you:

• Aren’t fully utilising the traffic you’re generating
• Not building an asset (an email database/list)

Here’s the arguments:

1. Not fully utilising traffic: If you’re getting a 1% conversion on leads sent to the list with the one-time exposure to the offer, would a second exposure generate another 1% conversion? Or even a 0.5% conversion? In which case your net profit has gone up by another 50% or 100% (1.5% conversion or 2% conversion compared to the 1% baseline conversion sending them direct).
2. You’re not building an asset: One of the reasons why the heavy hitters are able to reduce their cost of business is because they’ve built up lists of 100,000 or 200,000 prospects in some niches. Think of the list as your leads or prospects who haven’t found the right affiliate offer yet. There are a couple of additional ingredients you need to make the emailing strategy work (this can be highly profitable and will be covered in more detail in a later session), you need “bait” (an incentive to get them to sign up – a report, a book, a video, a consult session, etc), and you need to keep the list “warm” (you need to keep the list alive by engaging the members, continuing to send them more information, incentives, etc). Sending an occasional alert to the list, telling them to sign up for an affiliate offer is a good way to irritate them, and get them to quit the list, or even worse, hit the “Report as Spam” button on their email provider, and drive your email deliverability rates into the dumps.

With those negative points, why bother direct linking. Here’re some possible Continue reading →