The ultimate aim is obviously to drive traffic to the parent affiliate company and have that traffic convert into sales of the product for sale. However, to comply with Adwords TOS, an affiliate must provide unique content and not design the site solely for the purpose of sending traffic to the main parent site.
How do affiliates design sites that comply with Adwords and achieve their own objective?
Does this mean providing 'content pages' in addition to landing pages?
Does this mean creating an about-us page/disclosure page stating that we are an affiliate on behalf of *affiliate company*?
Any advice is appreciated.
First you have to create a great page with unique and relevant content to the keywords you wish to bid on. Creating one that meets the approval of the Google Gods has become very difficult to do, even for sites that are not playing the affiliate game. They have rich, relevant and unique sites and even they can get hit with the $10 minimum bid "penalty." And if you have affiliate links on your page, Google will be even tougher, or so it seems, and you can expect to see the $10 minimum bid "penalty" slapped on you very quickly, especially if you only have a thin landing page.
If you miraculously succeed in creating a page that the Google Gods approve of, then you will see how Google will quickly raise your minimum bids. And if you play along and agree to those new higher minimum bids, they will raise them again, at least on the most popular and commercial ones. Very soon, you will find yourself priced out of this business model.
An Affiliate who gets only a 5-10% commission cannot afford these higher new minimum bids on Google. As an Affiliate, I can afford 5 and 10 cent bids, and a few 15 and 20 cent bids. But anymore than that and I lose money. And Google is just not in the mood anymore to accept 5 and 10 cent ads, even on the deeper search pages. They now just repeat the higher priced ads on the deeper pages.
Even the parent companies are being squeezed by higher bids for page one placement and so many new competitors in every retail field all bidding on those popular, commercial keywords.
Sorry to be discouraging, but unless you can come up with the right niche product with a generous commission to overcome the higher bid costs and can create a great page with very unique and rich content, AdWords is no longer viable for Affiliates.
