Direct Linking or Landing Page for CPA?

[chris]

I am currently promoting my offers without using a landing page and I am getting successful results. If I use a landing page with opt-in's should I experience a big increase in my conversion rates or will that 1 extra page delay offers from being completed?

I know testing this would be an awesome idea but I want a unique landing page and in that case I would need to hire a designer and coder.

Also, I heard google frowns upon using direct linking. Could I receive a bad quality score without using a landing page?

[fred]

If you're using an opt-in, less visitors will actually see your offer. However, the ones that will opt-in are the visitors that are the most interested in your offer, so your conversion rate should actually increase, while the ones that don't sign up will mostly be those who wouldn't have bought anyway. But the best way to find out would indeed be to test this, which I'm highly recommending.

Regarding sending direct traffic to your offer, this isn't a good idea and you should only do this for testing purpose and for short periods of times. If you keep it running, Google will end up catching it anyway, which is why online marketers use landing pages. You won't need a designer though - just get an account with a cheap hosting like godaddy, which offers a web builder.

[billmcintosh]

Whenever you do direct linking you have 2 possible problems:

1. 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)
   
2. 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?