Affiliate Money Maker

Starting in April, Google’s policy on display URLs in AdWords will change:

 In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.

Why should you as an affiliate marketer care?

Many affiliate marketers use PPC and specifically AdWords to drive traffic to affiliate offers and generate sales.  It’s a quick way to make money as an affiliate as it doesn’t require a long term link building campaign to achieve desirable traffic amounts, albeit with its own specifics. PPC for affiliate marketing can be done in two ways:

• either an affiliate drives PPC traffic to his own site
• or the traffic goes directly to the affiliate’s referral URL directly on the product site.

The second option surely seems like an easier one, considering that the affiliates save the potential customer an extra step before making a purchase. But in terms of this AdWords  policy change, it would mean that affiliates will ahve to display their URL with the affiliate code in it, right? Which now doesn’t seem like a good idea as if somebody removes the affiliate code from the URL the affiiate won’t get credited for the sale…

That’s the reason why affiliates became worried about this policy change. There has been a number of posts on this topic, including this one by John Jonas .  He gives affiliates who do direct linking some tips on how to handle this new policy while outlining the negative sides of each solution as well.  Essentially, what he advises is:

•  getting better at AdWords than others advertising the same product
• setting up your own domain
• cloaking

Go read the complete post, it is worth it.

One thing I should warn you about, however, is  the difficulty of the third root, should you decide to choose it. It is REALLY REALLY REALLY difficult to do it right without having special tools - or a ton of your own resources.

Which is why I thought I’d post a link to a 10% discount code for Fantomaster’s cloaking tools, the leading tools in the industry. Some of you may find them useful, and with the price tag these tools have, this discount will come handy.