is it in bad taste or bad practice to create adwords that point people to sites via your affiliate link?
are you only allowed to create adwords ads for your own site? or can you pretty much link to whatever you want?
You can put your affiliate link directly into an AdWords ad if you like. If you've ever done a search and see an ad that has "Affiliate", "Distributor", or even "aff" in it, those are affiliate links in the ads.
It can work well and generate some extra income, however, it takes a while to learn the ropes and get up to speed, during which time its easy to burn through a substantial amount of money rather quickly.
You'll find some old threads in here and in the affiliate marketing forum on this topic.
from reading other threads it looks like people are putting up a "landing page" of sorts to explain the offer or link which they are looking for by clicking on your ad.. is this the best practice? or is simply putting the refferal link in the google ad just as good?
like.. if you know someone is looking for a specific item on ebay like a cd targeted at some sort of niche market.. would it be apropriate and do well to put your associates id link directly to that item in your ad and target those keywords? or to put a landing page..
also.. is it required to put AFF or affiliate link in the ad text? or does adwords do that for you?
Over time, your traffic will build up and you'll gain long term value from your advertising as people return to your site from bookmarks or links from other sites. Not every click you pay for will end up at the merchant site and at least initially you'll probably make less than if you send the traffic straight to the site.
Unless you have a rather large site that people can browse, I'd send the traffic straight to the merchant site because that way all your traffic will land at the site and cokies will be set as soon as the Ad is clicked. If you are promoting company X and all you have is one page about CompanyX or a specific product substantially less of your traffic will end up at the merchant site and people aren't that likely to return to a single page about a product or company at a later date.
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There will be presentations on this topic and related ones at the upcoming conference [webmasterworld.com] if you are anywhere near Vegas or can make it out there. Many times Google offers $100.00 - $300.00 AdWords coupons that are great for getting started doing this type of thing, but you never know till you get there if they will have them at the booth.
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