Consider Adwords

One good way to increase traffic to your blog is to sign up for an account with Google Adwords (see their advertisement in the left hand sidebar) and run some advertisements to bring readers to your blog or website.

Adwords has been around for a long time and is the basis for the Adsense ads that I have been talking about since I began this blog. Only as an Adwords subscriber, you become an advertiser instead of a publisher...well...actually as a blogger you become a publisher who advertises....yeah..I think I got that right that time.

To make money you have to spend money, or so the saying goes, and I believe there is some truth to that. However, a word of caution....if you want to make money you have to be very careful how you spend money. It's very easy to get caught up in the advertising world and end up spending more than you are making and we all know where that leads.

The money making secret to advertising is to budget your advertising dollars and track, track, track the performance of your advertisments. If the ads aren't making you any money, they are certainly costing you money.

I suggest you consider running an ad for a month, try the Adwords beginner plan. For one low fee you can set up an advertisement, control how much you will pay and let it run for a month or so. Then track the performance of your ad all the way through. If it isn't performing by mid month, change the wording, try something new and see what that does for you. Again, keep an eye on your hits and conversions and see if advertising is paying.

A few words of warning. Don't advertise until you have something worthwhile for your prospective readers. In other words, don't write a couple of posts and start advertising. Write a couple of dozen posts at least before you start paying for advertising. There is no point to paying for ads until you have something to advertise. Also make sure you put a ceiling on the amount you are willing to pay per click, you don't want a huge bill at the end of the month if you haven't made the money to pay for it.

I ran an Adwords campaign back in the spring for one of my blogs, The Cottage Chronicles I admit my visitor count increased somewhat, and so did my Adsense revenue, but not enough. In the end, it almost balanced out, costing me about $5 more than I made. So...was that worth it? Maybe, it brought some new visitors to my blog, some of whom may come back, and may turn profitable down the road.

It may have been my advertisements, I may not have written the best ad copy either. That in itself is an art form. An art form I don't necessarily understand. In the end I decided to end the campaign and try another one sometime in the future, when I had a few more posts and more information for people to find, choosing to find readers through other methods like search engine optimization, pinging, and posting to social bookmarking sites.

My advice is consider Adwords, consider what you are trying to do. If you have an Amazon Store for example, running an ad campaign is not only a good idea, it's necessary if you want to bring people to your store. If you are blogging, running an ad campaign may not be the way to go, at least in the beginning.

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