Online Business Journey Blog

Back in the good old days (2002 to 2004 or even 2005), many people made good money using Pay Per Click advertising (especially Google AdWords) by using direct linking.

For those who don’t know what’s direct linking…. it means you link your PPC ad directly to the merchant site instead of your own site or landing page where you pre-sell the potential customer first before sending them to the merchant site.

The main reason why many people prefer to use direct linking is because it involves a lot LESS work! In essence, you can set up a PPC campaign in just few hours instead of days or even weeks trying to build a site or landing page with compelling pre-sell messages.

Although direct linking still works as many online marketers are still using it. But it’s much more difficult than it used to be in the past. This is due to the “ONE-URL” rule established by Google few years ago.

The Google’s One-URL Rule states that only one unique display URL may show up in the ad per keyword search result!

For example, if two online marketers are using direct linking to promote the same site “www.cheapest-iphone4all.com” and bid for keyword “buy cheap iphone”, then what happens is that Google will only display ONE ad based on which one that has the best quality score and highest bid price.

Basically, you’re in a ‘bidding war’ with other marketers which can hurt your ROI and profitability!

In today’s competitive business environment, direct linking strategy can hurt if used wrongly. However, it can still be a good strategy for testing new niche market. For example, if you can find highly specialized niches that no one really knows about, then direct linking is a good way to quickly test out the marketplace.

Personally, I prefer to build my own niche sites or landing pages for my PPC campaigns.

There are many advantages of having your own niche site and landing pages, some of the main ones are:

1. You won’t be in a bidding war with other online marketers so you can rake in more profit.

2. You can switch and expand your landing page into a full blown authority niche site, this is key to your long term success online.

3. In the long run, owning your own niche sites provides real assets for you. Imagine owning a few authority niche sites that not only do well with PPC traffic but also organic traffic from the search engines. This can give you long term income streams.

4. Google and many merchant sites may one day decide to forbid marketers/affiliates to use the direct-linking method. If this happens, you can rest assured that your PPC campaigns won’t be affected.

I hope you find this article useful.

P.S. If you want to learn PPC, I highly recommends the PPC Classroom Course. But, unfortunately PPC Classroom has closed its door. You still can go and register for FREE now so that you’ll get notified when the course reopens in the future.

P.S. Other PPC guides I highly recommend are the NEW AdWords Manifesto and Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots.