Is it worth the extra effort to create a mini-site for an Adwords campaign, with the whole sitemap, terms, contact us blah blah blah, or do one-off landing pages work well enough. Any experiences?
I always make a single landing page to test a new niche. If I like the results I will then expand on the site and give it some more depth and authority.
Do like kinitex says, try one page to see if there is potential. The only thing is i've found it hard to regain a good QS (quality score) if you have a bad one to start. so that being said. i would recommend the following: 1) Make simple landing page with decent content and yoru affiliate links, consider masking them. Maybe throw in a couple authoritative outgoing links at the bottom of the page. After you find a campaign worth investing into 1) If your QS iisn't shot on the old domain, reuse it, otherwise reg a new domain. 2) Create a mini site, including privacy, contact us, footer links 3) Keep authoritative links at bottom (out of way so users don't click) 4) Consider adding a blog with content every few days or so (again, links at bottom) this seems to help maintain your QS Again, this is all for Adwords search network. Content network doesn't care about QS so you can get away with a lot more. Also, i generally test out my new campaigns in Yahoo - they have less care in regards to QS and stuff. Good Luck & Make Some Killer Cash!
Those are some great tips. When I started adwords, I got ate up by the keyword campaigns, so I tried placement targeting, and have had great success with it, but since QS isn't important for content campaigns, I never figured how to approach it. Thanks for all you advise LYT and Kinitex