Making Money With Google AdWords

As an affiliate marketer, you can make money without having a website of your own. You don't have to create a mailing list, newsletter, write articles and custom content, or anything else for that matter.

Making money with affiliate programs is as simple as advertising. That's it. If you can drive traffic to an affiliate product through your affiliate link, you can make money.

This is usually done using the Google AdWords system. You place ads on Google, and you pay only for clicks on those ads.

Now of course there's a lot more to it than that. Advertising on Google can be complicated, frustrating, and expensive if not done right. It takes a lot of trial and error usually too.

One of the first questions new affiliate have is "How can I advertise without a website?" Well the answer to that is simple. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you're given a special tracking URL, or website address. This URL is what the affiliate program uses to know when you've sent traffic to them, and when you've made sales and earned commissions.

The Google AdWords system allows you to use that affiliate URL in your advertisements. There are a couple of minor rules you have to follow. One of these rules says you must have some indication in your ad that you're using an affiliate link. This can be done by simply putting "aff" or "affiliate" at the end of your ad.

You don't want to use your affiliate link for the display URL though. Put the affiliate link into the destination URL of your Google advertisement, then put the main affiliate site address into the display section. This way you have a nice looking, relevant display link showing, and this helps make your ads more appealing to searchers.

Google does have certain rules about using affiliate links in your ads though. Primarily, they don't want pages stuffed full of affiliate links. So their system is designed to only show one at a time. If you're the only affiliate advertising a certain product, then your ad will be displayed as often as possible. If however, there are 5 other people advertising the same affiliate program AND using their direct affiliate link, Google will rotate your ad with theirs.

Because of this rotation rule, your ads may not be displayed as often and of course it may take longer for you to drive enough traffic to the affiliate site and make sales. This is a fine tradeoff when you're first starting out though, particularly if you don't have a website and don't know how to get one started.