05 Nov 12 8:29 pm
Hey Adam,
There's not really a single "right" answer about what to do here; as a rule, though, Mark generally recommends you don't run PPC campaigns from the get-go for your first (or even second) affiliate marketing site, until you have experience with optimizing for SEO first.
That said, you are already involved in PPC, so have some experience you should be able to apply to get profitable with PPC very quickly after launching your site. From a more general perspective, you're more than welcome to modify Blueprint however you see fit - if you know from experience that certain things work better for PPC, then apply that knowledge :)
With this in mind, you may actually find it useful to jump from Step 1 to step 10 of AffiloBlueprint, review those videos, then re-review Step 1 - so your blueprint path would look like:
Introduction -> Step 1 -> Step 10 -> Step 1 -> Step 2 -> etc...
Step 10 covers keyword research for PPC, with regards to affiliate marketing, so if you're planning to use PPC from day one it should be quite useful. You may not need to review Step 11 or 12, if you already have quite a bit of experience with PPC for client sites, since Step 11 and 12 (mostly) cover the technical aspects of using Google AdWords.
In terms of avoiding a newsletter - that is entirely okay, if you really don't think you have time to put one together, and you can definitely redirect from your website straight to the affiliate's (as long as you're not violating Google Content Guidelines). However, to maximize long term profitability, the newsletter list will provide you a far greater return on investment than PPC will, so be sure to keep this in mind.
Despite my rambling, I hope I've sufficiently answered your question :)