I'm thinking of using Adwords. However, I've heard that the learning curve is pretty steep. Should I plan on losing a couple bucks before consistently converting my traffic?
I suggest you read first, if you're completely new then you won't learn with a few bucks, maybe a couple hundred...
I think Adwords is sort of like web design... Everyone can do it, not everyone can do it well. There is a steep learning curve, but if you work hard at it you can be successful. I started learning PPC by advertising on go.com (through overture) about a decade ago, and I still try to learn something new everyday. Also keep in mind that even if you knew everything, there is still a possibility of losing money if your products, services, or website is sub-par.
I think that its very easy to learn at first, as there are plenty of people who can give you good advice on the basics, such as advert text, selecting landing pages, trying to improve your quality score etc. Then things get more difficult, as there are suddenly no more hard and fast rules - people have opinions, some things work for some people and not for others, and there are a lot of conflicting posts and ideas. This is particularly true when deciding how much to bid and where to appear in the rankings. This is probably THE MOST important thing (with the exception of the design of your website, but that's a whole different story) that you can change in terms of the profitability of your campaign. Pay too much, and your conversions cost a fortune, pay too little and you don't get any traffic at all. I've written blogs on this, as I'm sure others have, and would suggest reading everything you can find, and then start testing. Test everything - advert text, bids, landing pages, new keywords, the lot. And when you've done that, test some more. There are no hard and fast rules that are always true, once you've got the basics sorted, and you'll probably take one backwards step for every two that you take going forwards (or, if you're unlucky, the other way around!).
Other have added some great points in this thread....I'll just add one more. If you have a solid grasp of marketing basics, especially direct marketing, the learning curve will be much shorter. If AdWords is your first attempt at marketing be prepared to make a donation to the Google fund while you try and figure out what's what.
Despite reading just about every e-book about Adwords under the Sun, losing money on Adwords was my hobby until very recently. I could write a book about it if I wanted to! I have realized, therefore, that mastery comes with practical experience and not with learning theory. Although the learning curve is quite vast and you will almost inevitably lose money to begin with, I feel that the end result of being able to use such an effective advertising medium is well worth the wasted cash. Afterall, once you have the experience and know-how in place, you should be able to make all the wasted cash back, plus consistent profits.
This is true, but certainly visiting forums like this can help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls. Often, even an experienced Adwords account manager can lose money initially on a campaign, because there are so few hard and fast rules. The trick is being able to identify what's going wrong, and fix it quickly. And, of course, testing! Ultimately, there are only a few things that you can do, and they all have clear and predictable impacts on your campaign. If your clickthrough rate is too low, improve your advert text. If your conversion rate is too low, fix your site, check your landing page, and make sure that your advert is specific to what you do/sell. If your cost per conversion is too high (and the conversion rate is ok), then you are bidding too much, so reduce your bids. OK, so that's a simplification, but following these rules should fix most of your problems...
My advice: Don't start out with a low daily budget (1$-10$ like most people do). When starting a campaign you constantly need to tweak your adcopy, landing page, keyword selection, max cpc and so on and you just can't track conversions properly if you only get 100 uniques/day.
Think as a user while creating a campaign/grouping themed adwords and Keywords, Make sure You have a proper landing page that relates to the campaign, Make sure the text in the ad text is also found in the landing page., If you are afraid at how it will work, Schedule campaigns to automatically pause during your sleep time., and run it while you are awake so that you can check your performance until you learn the game