I’m Funny Sometimes…Adwords Success and Despair October 9, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a commentI have learned so much in the last year that I’m actually surprised sometimes. So are my sons and long suffering wife.
In this last year I moved from being overwhelmed and confused to being less overwhelmed and a lot less confused. And I’m starting to make money.
Last year I couldn’t grasp the importance of keywords. Really! What a difference a little time makes.
Especially if you are paying attention. My wife, who is a bookkeeper and tax advisor (among a lot of other attributes) came to me a while back and showed me the results of my adwords efforts.
I sorta knew. After all we were doing a lot better. And getting better too.
But I was surprised to find that our profits were up approximately $80k/yr and that of that increase 90% of it was attributable to adwords.
2 years back I didn’t even have a website. Then I got a really crummy one. Made it myself. I look at it now and then and just laugh.
When I had struggled through the whole process of picking a domain name and getting it hosted, I thought I was through. I wasn’t, though.
I expected the phone to ring and sales to follow. Nothing happened.
Then it occurred to me…Traffic! That’s the answer!
And it is the answer….except…it needs to be the right traffic. Arrggh!
So I looked in the wrong place. The phone book.
I found a few outfits that said they could get traffic to my website. They gave me estimates. I could barely follow their conversational path.
Now, I realize that I now know more about websites and traffic than they did then! And they called themselves professional!
I gave them $2500 dollars to SEO my site. I barely knew what that meant Then they went out of business and disappeared.
My nice new crummy website still had no traffic and it was 2006.
Now, what I wanted was a website that would increase the traffic at my store and thus increase my profits. I wanted that badly. Times were turning tougher. Housing slump, oil prices, war.
That and the fact that I have brick and mortar overhead made me long for simpler times. Or lower overhead. Or more sales. The mind reels.
So one day I was sitting at my computer and I brought up the Google page.
I typed in “How to make money online”. Wow! I never dreamed there were so many “solutions”!
Then I typed in “How to get traffic to my website”. Wow again!
That day I opened my Google adwords account. I followed the instructions.
The next day I had traffic at my website.
I then went on to make every mistake I could with adwords, including irritating Google.
My favorite mistake (and worst) was when I made some changes to one of my campaigns that I thought would improve things and then forgot about it.
Well, I had a little typo in the url (oops!). For a month! I forgot to check back! I didn’t test the ad. After all it worked before.
I bought a thousand clicks and sent them to the 404 Forbidden Zone!
I’ll see you on the road to success,
Riley West - An Oregon Pioneer trying to make his way in the trade.
PS: If you are struggling to get started here is a place perfect for you!
