So I've been reading up a bunch of Ryan Deiss and Perry Marshall's Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords (updated 2010). And after seeing everyone's recommendation on reading Google's Learning Center, it seems like all you need succeed in PPC is the basics. That and an insane amount of split-testing your sales page, opt-in page, PPC ads, etc... Is it safe to say those are the 20% of things we need to do in order to achieve 80% of our results?
The 80/20 principle applies to many things in life, google is one of them. To be successful in adword you need a number of different factors to come through
I purchased Perry Marshalls book overs 5 years ago and it was the best $97 I ever spent. My conversions were costing around $100 each before buying the book. We were selling Spanish Property so the return was OK however once I had implemented what Perry taught in the book my conversion cost $5. Maybe thats because at the time the Google documentation was not as good as it could have been, or whether Perry's book seemed to lay it out better for me to understand I don't know. Whatever it was, the book worked for me. Adding to you list of split testing etc, don't forget to implement your negative keywords if your using broad and phrase matching.
Thanks for the feedback SDC. And congratulations on your success! I've been devouring the book these past couple days and have learned a lot. At the same time, I kept questioning myself whether this was really all I need. Looks like I gotta get my hands dirty soon!