Hallo folks A newbie question: I would appreciate advice on which of the books mentioned below would be worth buying. I've read good things in this forum about the Andrew Goodman book, but it's not clear whether it's suitable for a novice or requires some previous knowledge. The other two books do seem to be geared more to novices. In any case, is it still feasable these days for someone starting afresh to make any money from Adsense? I haven't got a website or a product at the moment, and would be promoting books on Clickbank. I'm not expecting megabucks despite what the ads say! Google AdWords Handbook: 21 Ways to Maximize Results By Andrew Goodman http://www.page-zero.com/products_asroi.asp The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/ Google Cash by Chris Carpenter http://www.affiliatejackpot.com/index2.htm Thanks for your help. PS T0PS3O - interesting blog!
I bought the Goodman book based on Dan Thies's recommendation at Sitepoint. I have not read the others. I had my usual reaction to marketing material; It seems like a lot of money for what you get. I certainly learned things from reading it, but I find it terribly dificult to quantify the value. My guess is it will be more valuable the less you knew when you started. One thing which it makes clear is that success is going to require you to spend some significant amount of money testing and re-testing your ads, landing pages, etc. At a guess, if you are not prepared to budget $25/day for a month you would be better off waiting. Finally, since you are spending real money to bring traffic to your site, you want to make sure your site is ready to make the most of the visits. Your shopping cart should be functioning smoothly, your payment processing should be established etc. Again, if that is not the case, you would be ahead to polish those parts of your operation first. I resolved to force myself to study web marketing more carefully after the developers of Wordpress got into trouble for spam links on their site. It seemed really sad that individuals who could build such a product couldn't think of a better way to generate income from it. However, it takes a strong stomach. I am really tired of visiting sites with one page 300-400 lines long that promise the world. I am beginning to believe that even with all the trash and nonsense that gets posted in forums, the density of useful information is still higher than in the typical marketing book/ebook.
Possibly Perry Marshall but the book is not as big as it appears....their is another book that has been added to it as well. I know size isn't important but in this case it is deception as he says the book contains x amount of pages. I have found their is not really a lot to know about Adwords, it really is quite basic and I think all the main points have been covered in a few posts here at DP. Some points.....I know there is more to it than the few points I have listed but perhaps people can add to them. You don't need to be in #1 position, I have found #3 to convert much better and can be a lot cheaper.... but anywhere on the first page is good. Location...make sure you are using the right countries to send your ads to. Content ads....to use or not, I did use it but then turned it off,my costs went down significantly and my conversion rate stayed the same. I really don't think people who click on content ads are as qualified buyers as people who actually enter a search term. Plus the number of sites that are tricking people to click on the ads is growing daily. Use [ ] around your terms to keep the clickthroughs as relevant as possible. Capitalise the first letter of each word in your URL, it does make it stand out and people are more inclined to click on it if it is similar to the thrust of the term they are searching for. Make up many adgroups keeping the terms relative to the adgroup, and keep the number of terms as small as possible in each group. Google don't like hundreds of terms in one adgroup, the less you have the less chance of having keywords disabled. Make up three ads in each group and rotate them weeding out the ones with less clicks, even changing one word can make a significant difference. One thing I have noticed is that adwords always make sure you use up your daily allowance. I kept pulling out the most common terms with a high clickthrough rate but always within 2/3 days I found other terms would take their place. I have no idea how google do it but it happens. Normal search engine trafffic seems to convert much better than adwords but of course getting it is the problem. For one site I used adwords for a month then turned it off. It was producing 200/250 visitors a day. Now I am getting about 75 visitors a day without using adwords but the conversion rate is actually higher than from that adwords traffic.
Agree with Cyclops' advice. I would avoid Googlecash, because it teaches an affiliate marketing method which is not allowed by Adwords anymore in 90% of the cases.