Perhaps the following scenario has happened to you. You list a merchandise with the ClickBank affiliate program, and multiple affiliates decide to promote your merchandise . One of them outbids you and your other affiliates on Google on most of your keywords. Because his ad uses the same url as your advertisement , Google will only show his advertisement and not yours; those are the AdWords rules. But your heart sinks as you read his AdWords advertisement . Its terrible. It reads as if it we are written by an illiterate. Or at least an internet advertising affiliate illiterate. The writing says something like, "Check out this effective product. Money back guarantee." The headline is just as bad: "Exciting New [fill in the blank] Ebook." "Geez," you think, "that advertisement couldnt draw flies. I wont be generating any sales as long as this advertisement is running."

You have a few options for dealing with this situation. Remember, because this is the ClickBank affiliate script, you do not have his or her contact acquired skill to "educate" him or her on the intricacies of writing Google haiku. So heres what you might do:

1. You might outbid him so your ad runs instead of his. But this is going to cost you a lot of money, especially if your na affiliate has bid way too much in order to appear as Number 1 or Number 2 in the Sponsored Links column on page 1 of the search returns. So while your ego may be soothed by this tactic, you might finish up creating much less or no profit on any product you sell. Remember, the benefit of having an affiliate program is that they pay the advertising cost and you forego a percentage of your profits to have other all the people sell your product.

2. You can sit back and wait. In a few days, when very few people have clicked on his ad, he can get discouraged and pause his AdWords campaign. At that point, your ads -- or the ads of one of your smarter affiliates -- will initial running again. Take comfort in the fact that your excellent sales letter is still backing up that bad AdWords ad, so if anyone does click on it, your letter will magnetically draw them toward the "Buy" button.

3. You may find, to your surprise, that Google is still running your ads at least part of the time, even though you have bid less than your affiliate. Why does this happen? If your CTR (click through rate) is high enough, the Google system will run your advertisement sometimes, because your higher CTR tells the system that there is a better chance someone will click on your advertisement . And thats what its all about, as far as Google is concerned.

This is what happened to us. We decided to wait a few days to see if the affiliate got discouraged (which he eventually did). But meanwhile, at the identical measure that his ads we are running, we had some sales from our AdWords advertisement ! Our higher CTR meant that Google showed our ad at least some of the measure .

In the best of all possible worlds, we would all have our own affiliate code for our products. The joy of having your own affiliate script is that you have more control. You can have affiliate education understanding, including audio files, reports, and Camtasias. In this educational material, you may show what sorts of titles work and dont work, what sorts of ads draw more clicks, etc. But for those who must depend on the ClickBank affiliate script, they are more at the mercy of the ClickBank system. So if you are unfortunate enough to have a dumb or inexperienced ClickBank affiliate, patience may be your best ally.