It would seem that Pay Per Click advertisers are having full blown panic attacks and claiming that Google is out to kill off affiliate marketing, or at least prevent the use of Adwords to advertise it. All because the Google God has put her foot down and demanded that landing pages provide good quality content, that is actually related to what is in your ad, and that your landing page should be different to the zillion other landing pages promoting the same product/service.
Sheesh, the nerve!
Surely if I type in ‘Magnetic Sponsoring Review’ into the Google search bar, then I obviously want to be taken directly to the Magnetic Sponsoring capture / sales page right? Even if the ad tells me I’m going to a Magnetic Sponsoring Review site I should surely know that it’s actually redirecting me to the sign up page?
Well actually – no.
Google does not consider advertisers her primary customers. While there may be many thousands of folks advertising on Adwords, there are millions of people using Google as a search engine. And this is where her loyalties lie – don’t expect anything else and you won’t be disappointed.
The only affiliates who cannot use Adwords are those promoting ‘data entry’ programmes. All other affiliates are still able to use Adwords the same as they always have done in the past. But as with anything else, you have to keep up.
The following is directly from Google’s help pages on using Adwords:
Affiliate Policy
We do not allow data entry affiliates to use AdWords advertising, but all other affiliates may participate in the AdWords program. However, we monitor and do not allow the following:
- Redirect URLs: Ads that contain URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
- Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
- Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site.
If you are an affiliate and are paid to send traffic to another site or a distributor, the company you are promoting may also require you to comply with their own terms and conditions.
Please note that we will display only one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. Learn more about when affiliate ads show.
Now that policy hardly seems like Google is trying to kill off affiliate marketers using her advertising services. In fact, it is explaining exactly how to get the most out of using Adwords.
Redirects are usually done by folks who can’t be bothered to get their own hosting account so they buy the domain and then just redirect/mask it.
Bridge pages – haven’t come across this terminology before, but it sounds as though Google is talking about spammy pages set up simply to get a good quality score by using relevant keywords, and then just linking directly to the affiliate site, without any extra added value in between.
Framing – usually done if you don’t know how (or are too lazy) to create your own landing page.
I’ve done the redirects and the framing, still do for a couple of sites, but these are really only for the very new home business owner / affiliate marketer / network marketer. To be truthful, once you have a little experience under your belt you soon realise that the claims of ‘sending traffic to this page will make you rich’ are nothing more than an outright lie.
If you had to eat the same food every meal, every day for a few months, you’d soon get sick of it. Same goes for replicated sites – nobody wants to find the same page turning up on their screen, regardless of which ad they click. If you order bacon and eggs, you want bacon and eggs, but if you order eggs and beans you don’t want to still be served up bacon and eggs do you?
The trouble is that a lot of people are lazy – I can understand that – I’m all for the easiest, quickest, shortest possible time frame myself. But usually, the quickest way is to actually just take the time to do something right the first time.
Because I’ve not only read, but also use Magnetic Sponsoring every day, I get a little frustrated when I see folks promoting it but using the very techniques that Mike specifically says not to use. Folks who don’t take the time to actually understand what is being taught, and instead go off half cocked and start using spammy advertising methods in the hope of trying to make some quick money.
All Google is doing is trying to stop Adwords from becoming a spam farm.
“Post your crap here – all spammers welcome – our users don’t mind wading through piles of regurgitated, duplicate content”
If she doesn’t like it on websites, she ain’t going to like it on Adwords is she?
Ok, now that I’m off my soapbox, here’s how easy it is to get round. No redirects, no bridge pages, and no framing.
Hardly rocket science is it? Took me about two hours to create my first website with Weebly, and that included downloading it, removing the Weebly tag from the footer and uploading it to my own domain. And yes, for the newbies out there, this was back in the day when I didn’t know HTML from FTP or PHP (still not too sure on the differences even now, 
)
If you want to use PPC, check out the video training Mike and Jim have just put together. But please do it bearing in mind Google’s policies.
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please some body in the house,i dont know how to be an affiliate markerter,i have been looking for a good teacher.thanks for anticipated cooperation.
Which ‘somebody’ do you want for your teacher Peter? There are a zillion folks out there all professing to be expert teachers at one form of marketing or another. If you want specific advice, shoot an e-mail with details of exactly what problems you’re having with affiliate marketing and we’ll see what we can do.