I just got off the phone with a friend of mine from Germany. I’m teaching him how to do affiliate marketing with Adwords, and I gotta tell you, it’s a much more difficult for a newbie to have success on Adwords these days than a few years ago.
Anyway, my friend, who’s promoting an ebook on Clickbank, was complaining how most of his keywords had minimum bids between 0.40 and $10!?! I looked over his campaign, all his adgroups were ultra-targeted, all his ads had the keyword in the headline or the body. The only culprit is the infamous landing page “quality” score. Which is basically Google interpretation was what constitutes quality.
The landing page “quality” score now presents a big barrier to entry into the market for the newbie affiliate. Basically the little guy, who’s just starting out, gets screwed, while the experienced big players rack in the profits. I used to be a newbie not too long ago and I know how frustrating it was learning the Adwords system without having to deal with the landing page quality score.
Having to deal with the landing page issue (on top of everything else you have to learn) just puts a major road block between many peoples dreams of becoming a super-affiliate and quiting their day jobs. What was cool in the old days is that you could get a crash course in ppc affiliate marketing by doing Googlecash, or just throwing up a simple landing page and getting instant traffic from Adwords. I still recommend Googlecash as a method for affiliates to learn the Adwords system, since it’s fast and low risk.
Now a days you have to build a substantial site before you can launch anything on Adwords, or risk getting most of your keywords deactivated! It’s now much more difficult to quickly test out a market on Adwords before you decide to dive in with a full fledged site and campaign.
Here what I suggested to my friend: Start out on MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing (especially the new Panama system which is actually pretty good 
). MSN and Yahoo are great places for a newbie affiliate to get started, learn the basics before they tackle Big-G. It’s also a great place to quickly test a market for viability without having to worry about your URL getting blacklisted by Google for having a “poor quality” site.
Once you’ve learned the ropes and are ready to start building real affiliate sites, you’ll have to make a site that’s Adwords compliant. I’ll talk in some detail about how to do that in the next post, so stay tuned!
