I'd just like to reiterate the fact that affiliate marketing with AdWords is completely do-able and hopefully this will give newbies such as my self a little hope. I've spent the past day reading the forums and started four AdWords + Affiliate campaigns five hours ago and I just had my first conversion on one of them. My converting campaign only had 8 clicks and an average CPC of ~$1.36. The conversion earned me about $3. I had bid quite a bit higher on the keyword than I should have initially so I've lowered the max CPC and AdWords still estimates a 4-6 placement so hopefully I can get the ROI up over 100%
Congrats buddy, your bid seem a little high though for low sale conversion, so becareful. Don't put any of your trust on Google estimate, it said 'estimate' isn't it? Manually check your ad, you might be surprise it could be as far as x4 times the actually estimate, really.
I've reduced the maximum bid to $0.22 and placement seems to be about the same. Hopefully I can break even..
22 cents! I wish there were keywords in our category that were anywhere near that. That's great news that you managed a conversion and pretty quickly too. As a bonus you managed a profit. It sounds like you've found one of those keywords that you can actually make some money on which are increasingly rare.