Google [tag]AdWords[/tag] 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. When I began dabbling in AdWords, I had one strategy in mind. Use the shotgun approach with generalized keywords to get the biggest volume of traffic possible to my website (PlayKillerGuitar.com) and the numbers would take care of the rest. I was thinking that with a conversion ratio of 1%, I would make 10 sales per thousand visitors. Hmmmmm, easy money. I set up my campaigns and waited for the sales to come pouring in. Well they did, somewhat. I sold about 10 tutorials at 20 bucks a piece that month and made a cool 200 bucks. I was a king! Then came the debit from my bank account from AdWords. 250 bucks! YIKES! I didn't make any money, I lost 50 bucks! From there I tried using different keywords, lowering my bids, changing my ads, looking at competitor's ads and websites to try and get a clue on what they were doing. You name it, I tried it and still I was paying out the ying yang and ending up in the hole every time. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the heck I was doing wrong, so I did the next logical thing. Told myself that AdWords sucks and turned off my campaigns. Deep inside I knew that people out there were actually making good money, because I would see the same ads running week after week. Then I stumbled accross a book by [tag]Perry Marshall[/tag] called "Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords". I had to get on a waiting list because it wasn't released yet, but it was worth it. When it arrived it was hot off the press, a brand new release, and I got to say that it was the best 17 bucks I ever spent. 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 valuable things too like the importance of CTR (click thru ratio) and how to keep it high by pruning off the non-performing keywords. The strategy here is less traffic but quality [tag]traffic[/tag]. I started making a profit, even with my 20 dollar tutorials. AdWords still isn't my favorite form of traffic generation. I much prefer the free methods such as [tag]article writing, blogging, SEO[/tag], 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 doing it, right?

There are kazillions of blogs and other websites out there with the familiar adsense ads splashed all over the sidebars and integrated into the content of their websites. There are marketers raking in the cash selling e-books on how you can get rich with adsense and live the good life with an easy passive income. Then you have the software that will generate thousands of adsense "junk sites" as I call them which are supposedly optimized for the search engines and some that even add semi-relevant content pulled from random article sites. I guess what irritates me most about these software programs is that they contribute to the degradation of my search experience while I'm looking for answers on a certain topic. How many times have you typed a keyword into Google to research some topic and end up on 20 different junk adsense sites before actually finding something of value somewhere? These type of crap programs enable people to generate thousands of these "slum sites" which are plastered all over the internet. These bottom feeders are just wasting your time and grabbing a few cents from your wrong turn. It's no wonder that Google is forced into taking measures such as the "Google Slap". I once read an interesting article where Google's AdSense marketing was referred to as "CrackSense", I had to laugh when I read this phrase, because it rings so true! Think about it. You spend all kinds of time and resources building your business and attracting traffic to your website. Do you want your visitors to buy a product you have created? Maybe you have an affiliate site. Why would you want to sell your traffic off for a few cents, just so someone else can turn it into much bigger bucks? Shouldn't YOU be the one converting it into bigger bucks? I find this absolutely astounding! Ok, with that said, I have to admit that I have learned a lot about internet marketing over the past year & a half (and still learning). When I first started experimenting with marketing and set up my first website, I had those typical AdSense ads plastered all over the place just like the other chumps out there. But it didn't take me long to realize that I was throwing away what little traffic I was getting for a few cents. Sure, you can reason that maybe your visitor wouldn't have bought anything anyway, so why not have a "tip jar" to catch them on the way out? Maybe there's some merit to that logic, but I just can't help thinking that maybe that same visitor would have stuck around a little longer increasing the possibility of making that sale or capturing a new email address. Instead you sold them off for a nickel. I think I'll just stick to appreciating and maximizing the value of my visitors rather than pimping them off for next to nothing.