Somebody’s advertising the product you want to market. If you use the same display URL, you must bid high enough to oust the other product to get your ad listed.
If somebody is already advertising your product, it is a good sign. It means that it’s likely that people using that keyword have found that advertising for it pays off. Try to be clear that it is another affiliate that is marketing, as opposed to the supplier itself – the supplier is able to afford more than the commission they give marketers.
There is a way you can get a piece of the pie! What you have to do is to create your own web page, called a landing page, to market the product. This gets around the display URL matching problem because the display URL will not match the web site. The web page should come across as a testimonial, or product review—anything that would pre-sell. You’re not the salesman, you are somebody who somehow stumble on the product, and “just happened” to write a web site about it. Yes, the more savvy people will realise what’s going on, but I don’t think that matters; if the product is strong enough to sell, it will sell. There are lots of people that do not realise that you are paying for traffic, because although they clicked on a “sponsored link,” it doesn’t connect with them that you are the person that sponsored the link.
You can even market a few products in the same field, in the shape of a review. You may find this approach works better.
You will normally have to pay for web hosting and a domain name, although you can get started with any ISP’s standard web hosting service. Typically, domain name costs run to about US$10 per year; web hosting costs about US$3 per month. If you were marketing computers, for example, a domain name like computer-review.com would inspire so much more confidence than something like homepage.ntlworld.com! A lot of people use namecheap.com or godaddy.com as their hosting and domain name service.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
