We seem to have very little posts about GCN, is there a reason for this? The traffic potential is huge, why aren't more affiliates discussing it?
Are there obvious cons I'm not aware of?
I'd also like to know about this.
well the biggest disadvantage is the fact that they hate affiliates/affiliate offers... but if you haven an offer that they allow it's still one of the most powerful traffic sources out there
Nusolutionz nailed this, big ol' G is pretty rough on affiliates, but if you own a compliant offer, may the force be with you
Google is so picky about which offers it will allow and which, when I used to run there I would get an email every week saying the offer is in violation and then a week later they rereviewed it and approved it again saying sorry for the inconvenience.
Get Shelly Ellis in the house!!!
I have played a bit with adwords, and really this isn't that hard.
Basically you test virtually every keywords of a niche with your $100 coupon - talking about 10K's of keywords here,
cloack bots/reviewers to a legit site, and visitors to your landing page / direct offer.
Start bidding a bit higher, keep the keywords showing some positive ROI, remove the rest.
Then optimize them overtime, decrease bids etc, and start paying with your bank account.
You may need to open another bank account if you already have one adwords account attached to it.
Over time your CPC will naturally decrease.
Regarding the ads, you can copy top performing ads & get the same results.
Googles pretty hard on affiliates, and there some speculation that they actually lower your quality score based on the number of hops in your links, kindof like a tax for most affiliates.
If your going to advertise on there, I would recommend sticking to mostly legitimate offers. GCN is great for getting traffic on small-to-medium size, super niche sites on the internet. The larger sites (huffpo, etc) are on RTBs and shit.