Making Money With AdWords Is Mind-Numbingly Boring

I know I'm the middle of a detailed review of Day Job Killer but I may not finish it. Here's why. After reading and reviewing at least five different books about making money with AdWords, I can only come to one conclusion.

Making money with AdWords is boring, boring, boring. Here's my money, now just shoot me and be done with it.

Let me be clear: I'm not complaining that the books are boring, but that the methods they promulgate are boring. They all seem to come down to the same basic scenario:

• Find a product to promote via affiliate links. Browse through ClickBank, Amazon, etc. Look at all the sales pages. Boring.
• Do some keyword research around the product. Boring. Tiresome and tedious if you don't have a good keyword research tool.
• Set up some kind of website or squeeze page. Boring.
• Place some AdWords ads to send traffic to your site/page. Boring.
• Monitor your spending to make sure you don't go bankrupt. Boring with an undercurrent of fear.

The devil is in the details, of course, and that's why there are so many books — each book has its own variation (or variations) on the scenario above. But it's so damn boring.

In one of my recent newsletters I split people into two categories: Creators and Sellers. I'm firmly on the Creator side of things, which is why AdSense is so appealing to me: Google pays me to write, to create content. I don't have a Seller mentality. Look at the site I use to promote Uncommon AdSense. It's terrible. No one would hire me as a copywriter. I write technical whitepapers and articles all the time — feel free to contact me if you're looking for something like that, though be warned that I don't come cheap — but it's a completely different skill set.

One of my first jobs as a teenager was as a computer salesperson for a stereo shop in the small town where I grew up. This was the 80's and I was selling Commodore 64s. I was hired because I was good with computers, not because I had a Seller personality. But that was a mistake on their part. Because people would come in and ask “Can I store recipes on this thing?”. And I'd say to them that they didn't need a computer to store recipes, they needed a pack of index cards. Oops. That job didn't last long and I ended up packing groceries and stocking shelves instead — no Selling skills required for that, you see. But it was extremely boring.

I think all my recent activity focusing on AdWords has been the wrong path for me, and I think the readership of this blog is suffering because of it. I should get back to focusing on AdSense and to leave the AdWords stuff for others to play with. I still think it's important for AdSense publishers to understand how AdWords works, but you don't need to buy tons of expensive make-money-with-AdWords ebooks to do that.

So I apologize to my readership for straying, and I'm going to get back on the more interesting topic of content creation and monetization. I'll probably still finish the AdSense arbitrage series I started, even if it involves AdWords, but then we'll go back to normality and let the Sellers fight each other for AdWords domination. I don't have the heart to succeed at that game, it's just too boring.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

Comments