Originally Posted by houben77

Besides from arbitrage (where you put the affiliate url directly in the adwords campaign) the preferred method is simply building top-knotch landing pages and direct adwords traffic to them.

Here in The Netherlands Google already changed the rules to stop arbitrage, from now on the 'shown' url must be the same as the 'hidden' url in adwords. This means Google will not show any ads anymore with different url's.

For example:

shown: www.xyz.com/product
hidden (real url) OpenDNS

This will not work anymore in the Netherlands, Google will simply not show these ads in the network anymore. Perhaps YSM still allows this...I do not work with Yahoo.

All affiliates I know and work with use the following method to boost sales (cps). The build a perfect and persuasive landing page, with just enough keywords to get a great (adwords) quality score. This way I pay <0,10 cents per click, but conversions are high due to a good landing page. I always use nofollow on the url's btw. Besides I also write nice advertorials every once a while. Those are great landing pages too. Sometimes they are so good, that I can cancel my adwords campaign on the keywords, because natural traffic becomes better then bought traffic..

Anyways, perfect ads, perfect quality score and persuasive landing pages will do the trick.....