Affiliate Marketing

Yahoo Search Marketing Allows Direct Affiliate Links Now

Commission Junction sent out a pretty exciting email last night. It said Yahoo Search Marketing changed their editorial policy to allow direct links. Well, happy Valentine’s Day to affiliate marketers! Apparently, CJ got the exclusive scoop on this because they drove this change.

Second, you heard it here first – YSM has asked us to communicate this change to the affiliate community.

I went to relevant page in the YSM Editorial Guidelines to see for myself and found the good news.

Advertisers may not list a site they do not control (or an exact copy thereof) unless they are affiliated to the owner of the submitted URL.

In case the old guidelines are not familiar to you, like us during our first adventure into pay-per-click, Yahoo required advertisers to send traffic to an intermediate landing page in the past. So if you suck at creating landing pages, like me, you probably used Google AdWords to send clicks directly to the affiliate landing page instead. Now, I think intermediate landing pages are better in the long run but requiring their use was a big strike against Yahoo. That was too bad too because I really like YSM and so do many others.

It will be interesting to see how much, if any, this affects bid prices as more advertisers get on the YSM train. One thing is for sure though. I am about to spend a lot more money with Yahoo.

47