Being Bullied By Google AdWords

Google AdWords can be your best buddy, or an alligator
waiting to bite you. I don’t claim to be an AdWords expert
but I can speak out of experience from playing the game.

When I first started with AdWords, I had one strategy in
mind. Get the largest volume of traffic possible to my
website (PlayKillerGuitar.com) and let the numbers take
care of the rest. I thought that with a conversion rate of
1%, I could at least make 10 sales per thousand visitors.
Hmmmmm, easy money for sure. I set up my campaigns and
waited for the tidal wave of sales to come pouring in.
Well, my sales definately increased. I sold about 10
tutorials at 20 bucks each during that month which made me
a cool 200 big ones. I was a king! There was nothing to
this AdWords stuff!

Then came the deduction from my bank account from Google.
Yep, I never kept track of my daily costs (what a putz!)
and my total ad costs were 250 bucks for the month!
HOLY FREAKIN CRAP! I didn’t make any money at all, I lost
50 bucks! OK, a change in strategy was in order. I tried
lowering my bid amounts,  using different keywords,
changing my ad content, and even studying the ad copy from
my competitor’s trying to understand what they were doing.
I tried everything I could think of but was still paying
out the ying yang just to end up back in the hole.

I didn’t have a clue as to what on earth I was doing
wrong.  So I took the next logical step. I decided that
AdWords stinks and stopped all my campaigns. Deep
inside I knew that other marketers were making good profits
because I noticed the same ads running every week. While
searching for help, I came accross a book by Perry Marshall
titled “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords”. It was
the latest version so I had to get on a waiting list to
get it. I found that it was certainly worth the wait and
was easily the best 17 bucks I’ve ever invested for
marketing info.

I soaked in every page and was discovering all the things
that I was doing wrong seemingly with every page turn.
For starters, I wasn’t setting up my campaigns correctly
and my keywords were much too generalized. My keywords
were supposed to be very targeted. Man was I a greenhorn!
Mr. pretty savvy marketer was put in his place by Perry
Marshall’s new book.

I learned other important things as well, such as
CTR (click thru ratio) and how to keep it optimized by
getting rid of the non-producing keywords. The idea I is
to attract target visitors, not bulk visitors. Once I
understood this, I started making a profit, with my 20
dollar tutorials.

AdWords can be quite profitable when used correctly. I’m
still a big fan of the free methods such as article
and ezine submissions, SEO, using blogs, etc., but it’s
a great feeling to be able to have the mighty AdWords beast
under control! When you know a few good techniques, PPC
can actually be your friend, instead of the bully next door
waiting to shake you down for your milk money!

Jack Keifer is a contributing author for this website and
is an acknowledged expert in the art of link cloaking.
You can find out more about him by checking out his site:
http://www.amazingcloaker.com

[tags]google adwords, PPC adwords[/tags]

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Ray Burton is a personal training business owner, online writer and growing net entrepreneur. He is also the author of the controversial workout e-book, The Fat 2 Fit Program which is also part of his passive income sources along with the membership site FitterFast.com.

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