I've had very good success selling my own products in Google AdWords and am interested in using it to sell some affiliate products.

After reading the AdWords guidelines it has the following list of things you can't do:

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.

Now it seems to me that almost any landing page I thought of creating falls into one of these categories (or razor close).

How do you guys suggest using AdWords to sell affiliate products?

Thanks!

What did you do when you were selling your own products?

This is what is in the Google Adwords Affiliate Auctions Policy.

Where can I get my affiliate URL?
Your affiliate company should provide you a unique URL to use as your ad's destination URL. If you have questions about the URL that your affiliate company provided you, or if the URL does not work, please contact that company directly.

Originally Posted by handsome rob

What did you do when you were selling your own products?

I just have a dedicated landing page on the product site that encourages the visitor to download the trial version of the software. Up until now I have only marketed software that my company has created.

The Google guidelines I posted above are specifically for affiliates, so I have never dealt with some of these before because the visitors always stayed on my site.

Maybe I am reading the rules a little too strictly.

No, you're not.

Google wants you to send traffic to pages that add value for the user. And Google doesn't like affiliate marketing because they don't make money off it.

The way they see it, if affiliates can buy keywords cheap enough to make a profit on a lead/sale, then the keywords must be too cheap.

The goal of the average ppc affiliate marketer is to get people to their LP and get them to convert on the advertiser's site ASAP. Not all products warrant ebook-style 4 page long sales letters full of bold red text and testimonials.

But consider this: Once AdWords makes visitors' time on site a bigger part of your quality score, will you still want to just shove them out the door to the advertiser's page as quickly as you can?

Thanks for the input Rob. It is very helpful and appreciated.

My long term goal for my first site is to use original content and SEO to attract visitors.

In the short term I thought about trying the landing page/shove method. Guess I am just impatient.