The lack of decent, up-to-date documentation – you just have to look at the community forums to see the sheer amount of frustration this causes!

PPC is a great way to figure out a market and many people are still afraid of using it for this kind of thing. It is a great idea using a Thin Affiliate site in this way – you can get it done quickly and easily.

One thing I would say is not to have the site up too long in case Google issues a penalty (once that happens, its hard to have it removed). Also if Adwords penalises Thin Affiliate sites would this have an effect on your test results?

One use of these thin affiliate sites though is that it’s actually quite a good way to test a market out…

Let’s say for example I wanted to see if there was much demand for Tintin t-shirts (a site i set up last year). I wanted to test the market quickly so getting traffic from Google would not have been practical. Instead I created a thin-affiliate site (listing ebay products) and I sent traffic there using PPC.

My thoughts in doing this were …

1) If results (and sales) were encouraging I’d tear the site down and build a decent site on the domain.

2) If results were OK I’d probably keep the site up and let it die naturally. I’m personally happy to have a website online if I don’t need to maintain it and if it at least covers my domain renewal cost each year.

3) If results were bad, I’d probably leave the domain to expire and I’d feel good only to have wasted a few hours and a few dollars in total. I’d then think of a different niche and try the strategy again.

Best wishes,

Martin

P.S. Google Adwords also doesn’t like thin affiliate sites either so if you do test like I mentioned you’ll end up paying a lot more money per-click than more credible competitors. I’ll emphasise again that I think this is a good strategy to test a market with only. I seriously doubt there’s many people making a profit using adwords marketing and a thin-affiliate site these days.