Well, to be honest, I've been meaning to try this for years. Many years. But I've never really a) had the money to waste, b) had the time to spend, c) saw the need to, d) believed it was worth the money.

But, when Google sent me a R 500 voucher to try out, how could I resist?

Firstoff, let me explain how I got the voucher. (And, it wasn't my first one, but this time I'm not going to waste it). I signed up an account for Google Analytics. Then, I forgot about it. About 4-6 months later (which is today) I received an email from the BigG giving me a voucher code worth R 500! But, when I cashed in the voucher, it was R 550! Nice.

So, now for you noobs (heheh) who have no idea as to what Adwords really are, lemme explain.

Google Adsense / Adwords / DoubleClick is the biggest advertising network in existence. Bigger than Yahoo Overture. Advertising market of up to 75% of the market (depending who you believe). Amazing! Considering the size of the online marketing environment.

So, how does the thing work?

Website owners who want to market their warez go to Google Adwords, create an account, choose what type of payment plan they want (prepaid or direct payment) and then start creating campaigns.

Once you've created your campaign and campaign ads, Google puts the ads into rotation. This means, it starts displaying the advertisements on publishers websites.

OK, how this works: Publishers subscribe to Adsense, create advertisement slots (sizes, shapes, etc) and then get given code which they need to insert at chosen places onto their website. Google Adsense then indexes these pages (not immediately, of course, only after the page has been accessed a few times, my experience 3-4 times). Adsense has a completely separate index from BigG, that's why it indexes pages seperately.

OK, so the page has been indexed by Adsense, it processes / processes / processes and finally finds related Adword ads. And all that's left is to (next time the page is loaded) Google puts your add onto many many websites.

OK, so I've over simplified it, but that's Google Adwords in a nutshell.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to 1) update some more content onto our site, 2) add some more items for purchase and 3) then put up a Adword Campaign.

Let's see where this goes!

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