If you want to make money with Adwords, you will need to keep up to date with the new strategies that are constantly appearing, as well as keeping pace with the changes that Google makes to its Adwords policies.In 2007, with the publication of Day Job Killer, Adwords became a game of ‘kill the competition’. Almost immediately, software systems and membership sites sprang up to help the advertiser track and conquer his competitors’ ads. Unfortunately a lot of these memberships were very expensive.
Almost at once, people who could not afford the Adwords spy systems or were tired of the constant fighting for search engine placement began looking around for new ideas. Early in 2008 we saw the first signs of what they had found. In fact it was not new, but a rediscovery of something that had been considered dead – the Adsense content network.
If you have come to Adwords in the last couple of years, you may not know that the search and content networks were once united. Google separated them to give advertisers more control in the days when click fraud was common. Most advertisers immediately (and rightly) turned off the content network for their ads.
However, times have changed. Click fraud is nothing like as common as it was, thanks to Google’s very heavyhanded measures in closing the accounts of any Adsense user who has any strange clicking activity on their site. This is a big problem for Adsense site owners because it means that any bored kid anywhere in the world can put them out of business by repeatedly clicking on their ads. But for Adwords advertisers, it means that the content network has opened up again.
Advantages of advertising on the content network instead of the search network include a cheaper cost per click, and a lot more control. You can actually pick the exact sites that you want your ad to appear on.
The last point there is very important. When setting up a campaign for the content network, always specify target sites for your ads. In fact, you should specify not only the site, but the exact pages of the site.
Just like with the search network, you need to avoid having people click when they are not really interested, and you do that by picking out pages that are very closely related to your product. For example if you are promoting a dog training ebook, you will want your ad on a site about dogs but only on the dog training pages.
It is also better to pick out sites that have their Adsense ads ‘above the fold’ so that people see them as soon as the page is opened, without having to scroll down. Ads in the ‘hot’ area toward the top left of the screen will usually do best.

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