Forum Moderators: skibum
I've been making a few hundred from Adsense per month and would like to try my hand at affiliate programs and also PPC programs, so now I'm in CJ and Adwords.
Here's my question: there is an affiliate in my area paying pretty good money for referrals on widgets, but I've found *several* "widget1 widget2" combinations on Overture with like 5 cent bids, so I'd like to set up a page dedicated to these.
I know the accepted technique is to pique the visitors interest with some text on my site and then offer a link to an affiliate, but would it be black hat to just do an automatic redirect directly to the affilate, so the user never sees my page? I would just add my affiliate ID to the URL and send it along its merry way (with PHP). Is this a gigantic no-no? It seems like my ~5% click-through rate (or whatever) for the affiliate could then be automatically 100%. I could even parse the referrer to determine what the user searched for on Google and then redirect them to a specific affiliate page on widget1, widget2, etc.
I'm only doing this because there isn't much I can say about the widget (it's actually a standard boring service) and I'm afraid my affiliate click-through would be horrible. The result in Google would display my URL, but the user would never land on my page.
Thoughts?
P.S. I know you guys hear this a lot but ever since I started my website these boards have taught me so much I would have never learned on my own. It's truely a gold mine and I spend a lot of my SEO research reading these threads. Keep up the good work.
The net effect of them is to allow only the merchant and the top-bidding affiliate to show ads with redirects. Others need to have landing pages. I guess that could drive up bids. (Sorry, I don't know the details, just know this is an issue).
I think I can still make it work.
No Grandfathered bids chirps please.
hunderdown, thanks for your response. I'd been reading for a few days and posted my question and just found a thread dealing with it. And I thought I had an original idea... ;)
Url please?
