Avoid Adwords Bankruptcy
I recently almost had to file Adwords bankruptcy because I forgot to hit one little button! I am going to show you how to avoid making this same mistake which could eat away all of the profits you hope to make from your site.
Here is how I build sites. I search through all of the domain reseller sites (Afternic, eBay, Sitepoint, Domainsbot, Sedo) until I find a good bargain on a domain name. Once I have found the perfect address, I build a site to match it. I know this is backwards building on my part, but because of the current price of good domain names it is easier to get a good idea than a good web address. Therefore, I start with the domain purchase.
I recently came across a real treasure of a domain name: DavBeckham.com. David Beckham is a soccer, or football, player for Real Madrid. He is quoted as the most marketable player in the world. The price was right for this domain so I decided to build a fan site for David Beckham. I searched the web to find that luckily there was not much quality competition among similar sites.
I spent all day building the site and submitting it to search engines. I decided to run a Google Adwords campaign in hopes of driving in some traffic to get the forum started and increase the traffic. That was where I made my terrible mistake.
As I was building my campaign, I was very careful to create a catchy headline and curiosity grabbing description. I painstakingly selected my keywords. When I was finished, I had the perfect campaign. It was so good Beckham himself would not be able to resist checking my site out. As I went to type in my pay-per-click rate, I set the rate at ten cents. That's not much, but my site doesn't sell anything to re-coup the cost. Once I had the site designed and the campaign set, I went to bed.
About halfway through the next day, I was going to check on the site to see how I was doing. I almost had a heart attack when I realized that I had forgotten the neglected to hit one very important button, the decimal point. Instead of ten cents, I was bidding ten dollars per click. Apparently a lot of other people also thought my ad was irresistible. After I picked myself up off of the floor, pawned everything of value, and cashed in my life insurance policy, I realized that I would not be making any profit from the sale of this site. Only Becks himself could afford it now.
I hope you can learn from my very expensive mistake. Never mess with Adwords late at night. Just kidding. The real lesson is to be very careful when building your campaigns. It is important to have a catchy headline. Sure you should pick good keywords. But do not forget the small details like a decimal point. By the way, does anyone out there have some money I can borrow?
About the Author
Daniel Sims is a freelance webdesigner and graphic artist. He has been building websites since 1996.