Probably a stupid question as I should know this by now, but I've never tried it. I want to try redirecting to the merchant's page since my LP ain't cutting it for one niche lately, so I would just change the page I normally link to from Ezine so that it redirects, but I just wanted to make sure they were cool with this in your all's experience. I can't exactly tell based on their guidelines. Thanks.
You can only do it if the page you are linking to is a top level domain. From Ezine Editorial Guidelines: Affiliate links will be allowed if the link is a domain name you own which forward/redirects to the affiliate link from the top-level of the domain name. For example, it is permissible to forward to an affiliate link from: http://your-company-name.com/ ...but it would not be permissible to forward to an affiliate link from: http://your-company-name.com/page.html http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/ http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/page.html http://sub-domain.your-company-name.com/ Any article with an affiliate link that does not adhere to this guideline will cause the article to be rejected.
It's a good idea to use a redirected link which you manage locally on any affiliate effort. You can do this with .htaccess. When the program you are promoting dies, all you do is put in a new url and no matter where your link is in any article directory it is automatically updated.