Whenever you do direct linking you have 2 possible problems:
- Other affiliates can easily steal your campaign. They'll just reverse engineer your keywords, put up their own direct linking campaign and if their quality score is better than yours (or they outbid you): your ads disappear and you've lost your campaign. (I could do this in about 10-20 minutes tops if I wanted to)
- You are totally depending on your merchants landing page for quality score & you have no control over it at all. If they're doing something Google doesn't like (and Google doesn't like a LOT of things) then your ads get a big Google Slap & your account begins to get a bad quality score.
The easiest way around this is to set up your own Wordpress site. Just install Wordpress on the root of your domain and let Wordpress run your whole site. Then get an Aweber account & create an opt-in page. It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
Make sure you build your blog to match all of Google's requirements for a good quality score. (for more information about this see my 2 earlier recorded shows about Google AdWords & Affiliate marketing.)
Now you can easily fill the blog up with good content that Google will like & can provide organic traffic. Plus you're getting opt-ins and building a list.
Can you tell which method I like?