I finally received a reply from the MaxBounty affiliate manager and got my problems sorted. I had already done my research and decided on a specific pay per lead offer. This offer pays out $1.40 per lead. A lead in this case is described as an email address as well as the completion of a short survey. There were only 5 other ads for most of the keywords I had targetted so things were looking pretty good….until….
I got hit by huge $5 to $10 bids. Yikes…as most of the merchant landing pages are short squeeze pages with very little content Google must not like that very much. Sigh* I then hopped over to a forum and asked around about what other experienced CPA affiliates were doing to get round this. In less than 10 minutes I got a reply.
The answer…build your own landing pages. Shucks…I thought I could get away with direct linking or at least initially just to test the conversions. I guess not! Thats the first think I learnt about promoting CPA networks. You NEED your own domain and landing page. I haven’t quite had time to start on all of this yet but I’ll probably just purchase a generic domain that I can use for all my CPA offers. Will probably put that on the backburner for awhile so I can focus for now on my Clickbank products. Oh well…no one ever said this would be easy 
April 17th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
hi cheryl:
it is still possible to do direct linking with adwords (w/o landing page).
here’s my method: find out the top selling products/brands of your niche. Use the product name/brand models as your keywords, and link your adwords ad directly to the merchant site where its selling that product.
hope this helps.
May 9th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Hi Cheryl,
One of the easiest way to reduce the bid price is switching the landing domain URL. If you already have a established domain with lots of pages indexed in Google, your price will drop significantly.
This is why you need to focus on building a generic domain with good quality contents first. Then use that domain as your Adwords landing page. Use subdomains as keyword.
It may take some time, but while you do other things, build an auth. domain also.