Hello folks. I have some $80 to spare in my Adwords account and I am planning to create some campaigns to promote Clickbank products. However, I am really new to this stuff. I've worked in other areas of affiliate marketing (CPA, content lockers, PPI), but these landing pages and quality scores are something beyond me. I would like to ask if somebody can share the essential tips for running a great first campaign. I have some capital to invest in domains and I have hosting by HostGator. Some of the things that are unclear to me: Can I promote the affiliate link directly and what are the positive/negative effects of doing so? (e.g. http://XXXXXXX.hop.clickbank.net) Do I have to buy a domain and redirect it directly to the affiliate link? Advantages, disadvantages? Or do I have to put a short sales (landing) page in place? Wouldn't that be an extra hassle and a turnoff for potential visitors (two landing pages talking about the same thing)? Would .info domain work or would it reduce the quality score? What are the things that factor on the quality score apart from on-site SEO like titles and h1 tags?
QS is the backbone of Adwords. I've written an Adwords FAQ that explains QS in details too long to post here. Once you understand the role of QS and how it's calculated, you are a big step ahead. You CAN promote an affiliate link directly. Positives are obviously that you don't have to make your own page. Negatives is that if the affiliate's page does not follow the Adwords rules and guidelines, your ads will be suspended until you make changes. Since you don't have control to that page, you are under the affiliate's whims. Continued rule violations without fixing will get your account banned. You must therefore know the rules and not promote any page that violates them. This includes future page changes so there is a risk. You cannot link your own sales page directly to the affiliate's sales page. That's called a bridge page. Yes, they do turn off visitors. They told Google so and that's why you can't do that. QS is all about relevancy and click rate. See the FAQ. Your TLD (.info, .net) has no effect just like SEO. Google doesn't care about that, only to offer quality.
So this makes marketing of ClickBank products on AdWords a huge pain. I can't create a mini site for the sole promotion of the product. I can, however, build a large informational site and insert useful content with lots of affiliate links in the article body, hoping that the visitor is curious enough to click through?