Google AdWords can be your best friend, or it can bite you in the butt big time. I don’t claim to be an AdWords expert by any means, but I can speak a little from experience from playing the game.
During my first experience with AdWords, I decided that the best strategy was to get massive traffic pouring into my website (PlayKillerGuitar.com) and let the numbers generate the sales.
After all, it’s a numbers game right? I thought even with a conversion rate of around 1%, I could average about 10 sales per thousand visitors. Hmmmmm, such easy money!
I set up my campaigns and waited for the tidal wave of sales to come pouring in. Well, my sales did increase. I sold 10 tutorials and at 20 dollars a piece I made a sweet 200 big ones. I was a king! AdWords was a piece of cake!
Then came the email notification of deduction from my bank account from Google. Yep, you guessed it, I never bothered to check my daily costs! 250 bucks for the month! YIKES!
I didn’t make any money, I lost 50 bucks! From there I tried lowering my bids, using different keywords, changing my ad content, and studying my competitor’s ad copy just to try and get a clue on what they were doing. I tried it all and still I was paying through the nose and and ending up in the hole every time.
I was totally clueless as to what the heck I was doing wrong. So I took the next logical step.
I told myself that AdWords stinks and turned off all my campaigns. Deep inside I knew that other marketers were actually making a profit, simply because I noticed the same ads running every week. Then I came across a book by Perry Marshall called “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords”. It was a new version so I had to get on a waiting list to get it.
I was worth the wait and when it arrived it was hot off the press. I have to admit that it was the best 17 bucks I ever invested in.
Every page seemed to point out all the things I was doing wrong and illustrated the right way that it should be done. For one thing, I wasn’t setting up my campaigns properly and my keywords were way too generalized. Your keywords need to be very targeted. Man was I green! I thought I was pretty savvy, but Perry Marshall showed me just how green I was.
I learned other important things as well, such as CTR (click through ratio) and how to keep it optimized by getting rid of the non-producing keywords. The idea is to attract target visitors, not bulk visitors. Once I understood this, I started making a profit, with my 20
dollar tutorials.
AdWords still isn’t my favorite form of traffic generation. I much prefer the free methods such as article writing, blogging, SEO, etc., but at least I can now say that I’ve tamed the beast, somewhat. PPC is a great way to get a brand new website rolling for your product until the free techniques start kicking in.
That’s what works for me anyway. I’m still on my way up, so who knows, maybe next
year I’ll look back and think I was crazy. This is what works for me so far, and when something works, why not keep going, right?
