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A few days ago, Amazon made some changes to their Associates program where they no longer allows affiliates to drive direct traffic from PPC campaigns. These changes apply to affiliates in US and CANADA only. This is obviously a major change in their policy and it will affect many affiliates who were driving direct PPC traffic to Amazon. These affiliates were in direct competition with Amazon internal PPC campaigns and it’s quite possible that Amazon has decided to eliminate this competition and increase their PPC revenues quite a bit by this move. This is not surprising given the state of the economy and the desire to increase revenues where it makes sense. With this change in place, affiliates that want to continue getting revenues from Amazon will have to drive traffic to their own landing pages with links to different Amazon product pages. This is actually not a bad thing as the trend with search engines as well as some other eCommerce sites to try to move affiliates away from direct linking to product pages. In the long run the smart affiliates will benefit by being able to build their lists and eliminate the process of providing their converting keywords to Amazon or other vendors. So maybe it’s time to get back to basics and build a solid business that will generate profits in the long run.