But before you jump to any conclusions, don’t forget that only the most expensive clicks earn more than 50 cents or a dollar or two a click.  Your clickbank or CJ product might sell with a $25 commission.  Lets do the math.  

If your adsense conversion rate is 1 in 10, and you make an optimistic $1 a click, that means that out of every 100 visitors, you’ll $10.   If your product converts at a rate of 1:100, and your commission is $25, you’ll make $25.  Would you rather have $10 or $25? 

Ok, raise your hand if you want $35. You want to earn $10 for the clicks, and the $25 for the product.  That would work great, if everyone got paid for suggesting a product.  BUT, remember that affiliate marketing requires a click, and a cookie (and you have to be the LAST cookie).  

if your website has adsense, and your shopper has noticed that you are showing an adsense ad for the same exact product somewhere else, they may be temped to comparison shop, or at least click away from your site.  No click / no cookie for you. 

So, then, the question becomes, do you use adsense at all on an affiliate site?  Well, sure. You can use it on informational pages, if you aren’t pushing for a hard sale.  You can use adsense on content pages where you’re pretty sure no one is in a buying mood.  And you can use adsense on website ideas where you don’t have a great selection of product to sell.  (the downside with this is that usually if you don’t have a great selection of affiliate products, you also won’t get great adsense ads.). You can also use adsense on informational websites where you aren’t making a hard sell at all. See my post on soft selling.

• Your full name and business name. If this is going to be a serious business venture, treat it seriously. At first glance, a company name looks a bit more like something that’s going to earn some revenue than “wallysmith” 
• A valid email address, preferably one that would look good at the top of a resume.
• The urls you use or own. If you don’t own a website yet, buy one for your new company, and think of it as real estate. Even if you’re just interested in running PPC campaigns, create a small website that says that you’re a PPC business. (see other articles for more info on creating websites)
• Any offer or incentive that you are passing on to the consumer. This only applies to loyalty or coupon sites. Are you donating a portion of the purchase commissions to charity? Are you giving the consumer cash back? Does your frequent buyer get a free ipod with $10,000 worth of purchases. You get the idea. Otherwise, don’t put silly things in the box. Incentive offers get double flags for advertisers, so when reviewing, I have to click ok twice. An affiliate manager on his 25th new publisher might get annoyed and click cancel or decline by accident. 
• Use correct grammar and punctuation. Remember that people reviewing these are from the 9-5 business world. They’re looking for some level of professionalism. 
• How you are going to promote the product. Depending on the affiliate network or program, this is either in a drop down form, or in a paragraph style form.  If you don’t have any ideas of how to promote your new advertiser, don’t apply yet – you’ll risk getting kicked out for being inactive. For those of you who are a bit confused, here’s the breakdown of promotion methods
  • Content / Website – You own a website, you’re going to put banner ads or articles about products on it. 
  • Email Marketing – You’re going to create a list of people and send them emails about products
  • Paid Search (Search Marketing) – You’re going to advertise on Google / Yahoo / MSN and then link back to their site or a landing page that then links to their site. 
  • Incentive – You’re going to give them something to buy products.

Insider TIP: Ever wonder why you were declined from an advertiser? Don’t hesitate to ask. You might be a perfect fit, but were missed because the advertiser didn’t understand how you were going to promote their product. Maybe your DVD site didn’t make sense for a women’s clothing store on the application, or your country of origin is outside of their shipping range. A quick email may be all it takes to get back on board. 

More and more advertisers are hesitant to give up the rights for publishers to run PPC campaigns on their brand terms. While it may aggravate the publishers, the reasoning is sometimes sound. For the advertiser, small in-house paid search campaign is sometimes more cost effective than paying commissions, depending on the bid prices and the competition in the market place. A smaller business may pay only $100 per month to cover ppc fees to get some paid search coverage, but find affiliate commissions ranging in the $1,000 range for the same volume of sales. 

There’s also a large concern among advertisers over ad content. If a publisher forgets to turn off an ad for coupon or promotion that’s expired, the company’s customer support phone line may experience a huge volume of calls from customers looking for their “discount”.  At this point, the advertiser is almost always responsible for honoring those discounts, or stuck doing extra work to resolve the issue.

So, the question is, if brand names are off limits, is it possible to run a pay per click campaign successfully without having the brand name as a keyword? The answer is a resounding… it depends. I think maybe the best example of PPC without Brand is ClickBank. Here, hundreds of products get sold without any real previous brand exposure, just on their merits alone through sell pages. And the price points vary from $10 to $100′s.  But I’m not sure the example holds true for every product out there in affiliate land. Insider Tip: Bidding policies may not be fixed in stone.  Contact your advertiser if you have questions about their ppc policy and its restrictions.