Few days ago I met a businessman in Harvard Square, Harvard University Campus. He been in business for long long time. He does silver jewelry business. Few years back he got somebody do a cheesy website for him that sells those jewelry. He been struggling with that for years. He was looking for some help from me on his website.

During the conversation I asked him what advertising methods he uses. He said he uses Google AdWords. And only AdWords. I asked him how was the ROI (return of investment). He said with his last campaign spending 700+ dollars he got two orders of less then hundred dollars.

Whats wrong with this picture? ROI is really bad. Main problem with this gentleman’s strategy is he was trying to do something that requires some skills, which he does not have. Using ppc programs like AdWords need skills to pick the right keywords so advertiser doesn’t end up paying too much. Its a trial and error process picking the best performing keywords, discarding the non-performing keywords. While this may increase the sales a lot if done right, a business can also loose lot of money if done wrong.

Here are few suggestions to New PPC advertisers:
- Before you jump on PPC advertising like Google AdWords or so learn how it works and learn how you can maximize the ROI. All those systems offer a good amount of help pages, read them.

- Start small, don’t spend too much money before you understand the whole thing. One common mistake newbies does is they bid high for very competetive keywords. Thats a bad idea. Go for less expensive little longer keywords first.

- If you can’t do it, get help from people who can do it right.

- There are alternative advertising solutions like free classified ads. Explore if those advertising solutions can help you without spending much. That will give the initial experience of doing some marketing; after all experience does matter.