Using PPC to Drive Traffic to Advertiser's Sites

[nostalgia]

I'm new to the affiliate world and have a few questions regarding driving traffic to advertiser's sites using paid search listings.

Which affiliate programs (CJ, etc) allow direct linking to advertiser's sites via search listings (Adwords, Yahoo, Miva, etc). In other words, I would use PPC to drive traffic directly to the advertiser's site, without having a website of my own. Do most affiliate programs allow this?

Which search engine ad networks (Adwords, Yahoo, MSN, Miva, etc), allow multiple affiliates to link to the same site. For example 'affiliate 1', 'affiliate 2', and 'affiliate 3' would have PPC ads linking to 'merchant A'. Do most search engine ad networks allow this?

Thanks for your help.

[markwelch]

It is not the network, but the individual merchants, who approve or disallow "direct-to-merchant PPC." In my experience, most merchants allow it but have specific lists of "prohibited keywords" (usually including the company name and domain name, sometimes including a longer list of keywords). A substantial minority do prohibit any direct-to-merchant PPC.

FYI, there are quite a few "promoters" out there encouraging "newbies" to try a wide variety of affiliate strategies, including direct-to-merchant PPC and AdWords/AdSense arbitrage -- and these strategies are costing a lot of inexperienced affiliates a lot of money. Most new affiliates LOSE MONEY on these strategies. (Try searching for "Can I Make Money with Affiliate Arbitrage" on Google.)

I've been doing this for 11+ years, and I still lose money on most of my test campaigns, for most merchants. There are certainly many opportunities out there, but it's hard to find any low-hanging fruit.