The sole purpose is to convert traffic to sales and cash in on the commission.

There is a major problem with the website!

Can you see what it is?

The website design is reasonable, it's user friendly and straight forward to use. The end consumer would have no trouble navigating around and should be able to find the product they want easily. Once they have found the product they want, they can click on the BUY ME button. They will then be transfered to the same product on the merchants website without realising they are about to earn the original website's owner a nice commission from their purchase.

This all seems good and well until we hit the real world and it doesn't all go according to plan!

Have you seen where the problem is?

Being an affiliate website, the content isn't original and there will be none if only a few backlinks to the site. Because of this, the website will be ranked poorly by the search engines due to no popularity. Although the On-Page Optimization can be as good as physically possible, with no-one linking to it, the search engines don't even know it exists!

This causes the first major problem.

No Organic search engine results! No visits and no sales!

SO, you need visitors and begin on a Google Adwords campaign.

The trail of thought goes: Hundreds of keywords - Lots of visitors - Nice big commission cheque. Win Win Win! Yes?

No! The second major problem.

Due to the Hundreds of products and Categories on the website, the target market is just too big!
You can spend a fortune by bidding on the best keywords but they won't convert to sales, at least not at the same rate as the Cost Per Click from the Adsence campaign.

So is threre any hope?

Yes! Narrow down the scope of the site. Shrink you target market down to a very specialised niche.
The smaller the nich the better, as long as there is a demand for the product, you will be able to convert the visitors to sales without going broke on Pay Per Click.