There is a lot of people making big dollars with Pay Per Click Advertising and in particular with Google Adwords. However there is also a lot of people who are throwing money away and making Google very rich and themselves poor in the process.
The good news is that it IS possible to create a profitable Adwords campaign but it does take a little research upfront. The more research that you do the better the foundation that you set and hopefully your ads will start driving quality traffic to your site.
The reason that research is so important is that these days PPC Advertising is extremely competitive, especially if you are marketing a high value product. That means that simply to stay on the front page of Google you need to pay a lot of money for each click that you get, and that is still no guarantee that your ad will get clicked on at all.
The biggest mistake that unwary advertisers make is not researching their market and keywords first.
You need to know which keywords are getting the traffic and what prices that these keywords are going for.
Google has it's own keyword research tool, or you can use one of the free keyword selectors online. It is important to know which phrases and words are getting the most searches. Once you have done that you can enter your search term into any search engine and see who your competition would be for that term. You might find that you have found a keyword that people are searching for but that doesn't have a lot of competition from other advertisers. This alone would keep your bid prices down and still keep you on the front page of Google.
While you shouldn't ignore a keyword simply because it has a lot of competition (sometimes this indicates that it is a highly profitable niche), if you find a phrase that doesn't have as many advertisers, it could be a good term to dominate.
Researching your market before you launch your Adwords campaign can help save you lost dollars and start driving targetted traffic to your website.
