Should you use Google AdWords?

Google has two advertising programs, Adwords and Adsense. The one feeds the other.

Google Adwords is used by those people who have something to sell. They write up an ad, of about 15 words, and choose a lot of keywords. Whenever someone conducts a search using their keywords, their ad will show up on the Search Results page. If someone clicks on that ad, they are brought to that person's website, where about 1 % of them will end up buying something. (A 3% conversion rate is the ideal, most websites have a 1% conversion rate.)

The keywords the person selects cost money. From 5 cents to 10 cents, 50 cents to a dollar. Because of this, AdWords should only be used by those people who are selling big ticket items on their site.

(I made an expensive mistake in this regard, many years ago. I had just started a science fiction website, and though I could increase my chances of getting into the search engines quickly by using Adwords to drive readership there. My only income stream on the site was Adsense and Amazon.com.

No matter how hard I tried choosing my keywords, I could never get the cost-per-click to go below ten cents, and frequently it was considerably higher than that. After three days I'd accumulated a $30 bill. But the people who went to the site would click on *one* ad themselves, for which I'd earn a whole penny! And although lots of people would check out Amazon.com, not a one bought anything.

So I canceled my campaign and just worked at building the website the straightforward way, by adding content on a regular basis, and establishing a presence in various newsgroups where I displayed my knowledge of science fiction in all its media forms, and used my website URL in my signature block.

After a couple of months, it was like *snap." Overnight the visitors came, the clicks on the Google ads came, and I was getting several small payments a day which over the course of the month added up. And although Amazon was always disappointing , Christmas time is always very good.

However, if you're selling a big-ticket item, something that will earn you $20 or more should someone purchase it, then using Google Adwords to drive people to your site can be a good thing.

You would not use Google Adwords to try to drive someone to your blog! That will occur naturally, after you've had the blog for a month or so, and have 30 entries chock full of text that someone is going to search for, eventually!