Alright, I guess you received enough answers from people to understand what Google Adwords is. Now I would like to share a little bit of my experience. I wouldn't really advice you to use Google Adwords to advertise a blog unless you sell some product on it. Google Adwords is very expensive "organic" advertising, but on the other hand very cheap if you sell products. I have used Google Adwords for a very long time and it really helped me to boost my sales. I returned all the money invested since I sold a lot of products using google ads. In my opinion, I wouldn't recommend you to use Google ads unless you sell something, at the meantime you can try improving your google ranking. Basically choose a keyword phrase, by which you might want to rank first. Use google keyword tool to find an appropriate keyword here. Then try to use that keyword phrase in your posts. So that your blog will contain plenty of these keywords. Then, you might want to make backlinks to your website. Backlinks will improve your google ranking. The best backlinks is anchor text backlinks. It is when you make a text and that text contains a link. It is best to use your keyword phrase as an anchor text. Anchor text looks like <a href="YOUR WEBSITE URL (include http://)">YOUR KEYWORD</a> To make great backlinks you better spy on your competitiors. So type into google the keyword phrase you want to work on, and see which website comes first. Copy the url of that website and paste onto this website here, then you will see all the incoming links to that website. Then you can click on these links and make your own anchor text there. So lets say my website has a link on blogger.com/blablabla then after spying you will see that my website has incoming link from that site. So you can go there and paste your own link.. That is a backlinks. The more you have the better, however quality is also very important. Better start with the most valuable backlinks like facebook and then moving on spying your competitors. You can make a backlinks on facebook by putting a link onto your profile (homepage url). Even though it will not be an anchor text, you will still get inlink from facebook. Additionally you must look organic. Do not make short and obvious comments on blogs/forums like: Hey Nice Blog! <a href="http://forums.digitalpoint.com">Great Forum</a>, this would look really fake, first the comment might not be approved, second if google finds out that you make these comments you will get banned.. You must look organic, use your anchor text with keyword in the comment but make the comment look real. Like you just wanted to mention your website in the comments as a good source or something like that... Anyways, don't want to spam this page with a long article. Hopefully my info was useful for you.
Thank you all guys for your very helpful experience and info. Now, I'll look for it Google adsense rocks!
If you are just looking for traffic you can have loads of them via their content network without costing you an arm and leg. If you are just targeting US & Canada traffic than it can cost you a little higher.
I have heard that Adwords is not performing nearly as well as competing smaller companies. There are so many new forms of advertising like "in-video" or "in-Image" but am not sure if the small companies are ligit. has anyone tried an alternative to Adwords and found success?
AdWords is a good medium for traffic. Bids depend on the market and your targeted keywords. Use tracking to see which keywords convert (make sales). Start small then work your way up.
I think it depends on the service/product being offered. For some, Yahoo SM works better (high ROI) than Google Adwords. But now with it combined with MSN Ads I'm not sure of it's performance...
You've got to watch the 'content' traffic though; start with really low CPCs - like in the pennies. Content network, depending on your keyword, can get a lot of bogus click-throughs from overseas users/bots.
Google adwords helped my site get off the ground but it was quite expensive, especially during the early stages while I was trying to work the whole thing out. Very beneficial though! Go for it!
Since CTR affects the ad's Quality Score, I've seen it recommended that new ads should be bid somewhat high so CTR will (hopefully) be higher. With a higher CTR you hope the minimum bid is lowered so the clicks cost less for higher positions. If you start with really low bids, it's possible hardly any visitors will see the ad, which may keep the CTR close to 0%.