In a nutshell, I'd like to see Google offer a restricted affiliate program whereby ONLY existing AdWords advertisers could enter in e-mail addresses of interested friends and colleagues into a referral tab on their AdWords account manager and have a hybrid note sent to their friends with a unique sign-up link.
When friends signed up via this URL, the referrer would either get a per-member bounty award, or perhaps (even better yet!) get a percentage of their friends' spending (1%, for example).
As an example... Joe Webmaster is chatting with friend Jill Webmaster, and Jill seems interested in trying out that AdWords thing. Joe then logs into his AdWords account, clicks on the REFERRALS tab, types in Jill's e-mail address along with a short note: "Jill, this is the Google pay-per-click program we were chatting about earlier" and hits SEND.
Jill then gets a note from Joe's e-mail address and with his name, including Joe's blurb and a Google standard footnote below ("If you do not know the sender or otherwise believe this is spam, please forward this note to..."). Included in the e-mail is a unique link that is only valid for one-time use, so neither Joe nor Jill could use this in mass e-mails or on Web pages.
Happily for Joe, Jill, and Google, Jill is the advertising manager for a large corporation, and spends $500,000 in her first year with AdWords. Joe is thrilled to receive affiliate checks from Google totalling $5,000 (though he's bummed when he realizes that he has to pay 30% of this to the TaxMan come April).
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Anyway, what do you think of this idea and example? Likely? Desireable?
I'd feel cheesy getting my friends' money though - even if you disguise it by saying Google pays the 1%
