In my previous blog post, I explained why I thought Google Adwords did not work for me. However, I was determined to crack the code on Google Adwords. I wanted to make it work, as I was quite certain there was a RIGHT way to do this. Thus, I began to search for my answers online.

One of the company that appeared frequently on my radar was Mindvalley. The name seemed to creep up whenever I ran searches on Pay Per Click and Google Adwords related terms. And it always came to this landing page that exceptionally caught my attention - “Why Almost Everyone Is Wasting Money And Getting Burnt With AdWords!”. The headline appealed to my emotion, the layout design was clean and easy to read, and credibility of the program was built on the fold itself (About the Authors section).

Of course, I read on, and again the copywriting appealed to me. I guess the fact that it was written in a convincing and credible way. This website was unlike all the one-pager sales pages I had seen in the past. This was different, and it looked like knew what they were talking about.

And then there was this 90-day guarantee that shouted out to me. I had nothing to lose if I didn’t find the book useful. Obviously, this was another one of Mindvalley’s gimmicks to assure uncertain potential buyers like myself.

After thinking about it over for several days - ($97 was quite a hefty price to pay for a book) - I decided to take the plunge and click on the YES, GIVE ME THE SYSTEM button, shouting out to me at the bottom of the page. Instant PDF downloads were listed on a page as follows, after you have made your payment at PayDotCom:

All downloads went smoothly, and everything Mindvalley promised was given. The only setback I felt at this point was that the Google Adwords $50 credit only applied to NEW Google Adwords customers. I already had a account and therefore could not use this on my existing account. Also, the $50 Yahoo! Search Marketing credit had already expired.

Once all files were downloaded, I started reading the first book - Adwords - The Winner’s Playbook. First, the groundwork was laid, and the expectations set. Although, they kept saying that this book was not for someone entirely new to Pay Per Click, I couldn’t help but feel that this was intentionally to promote an affiliate product of theirs - Perry Marshall’s “The Definite Guide to Google Adwords”

Anyway, the first chapter primarily dealt with coming up with keywords to use for the Ad. Most of the strategies here I found to be quite commonplace - e.g. word variations, use mispellings and using adjectives on keywords. Keyword suggestion tools were introduced as a way to get ideas on keywords, as well as learning how to check out keywords used by competitors. The next description on keyword matching options - “broad”, “exact”, etc - I thought Google had already provided.

Perhaps the more important lesson learnt here was the need to group related keywords together, and have these words highly related to the words use on the Ad. Of course, the final part of this chapter - Scrubbing the list - seems like a logical thing to do. Perhaps this is something that most people fail to miss out in their haste when using Adwords, and thus end up paying for clicks that don’t generate results.

Catch my next post, as my review continues on the rest of the chapters in Adwords - The Winner’s Playbook.