Here is just a quick story about one guy I know - it's not me, no, really, it is not...

Anyway, this guy - let's call him Mark - err, I mean Bob. Well, Bob decided one day that he was going to explode his online sales with the use of Google AdWords.

He had a nice, relatively inexpensive Home Business Opportunity to market and while sales were moving nicely he figured that AdWords was worth the investment of time and money. Now, Bob being a pretty smart guy didn't think he needed much in the way of AdWords training. Let's face it, it's not rocket science and one can get plenty of ideas for advert style from looking in one's niche market, and there are plenty of keyword tools so building a list is a 10 minute job.

Anyway, Bob set up his first campaign, ad group, ad copy and keywords. He chose $0.30 a click, as he was competing with some well used keywords, and a daily budget of $50.00. His landing page was simply asking for people to opt-in to his newsletter, for which he would tell them to get $800 if free pay-per-click advertising.

Things looked to be going nicely. The ads were being clicked, the click-through rate was high and the cost per click was falling nicely over time - all while maitaing a nice page 2 or 3 ad postition.

People were signing up to the news letter and as we all know, the more people in the list the more money we will make.

All was good in the world of Bob. So good, in fact, that Bob decided that a family vacation was in order - one where computers couldn't infringe. The business was on auto-pilot and a new batch of hungry buers were beating a path to Bob's door.

Two weeks later Bob comes back from a great vactaion and immediatly wants to see his sales figures for the last month and assure himeself that the $1500 AdWords expense was justified by sales dollars.

Shock. Horror. Sales are the same. A quick check of the logs shows that exactly two people who sign-up for newsletter actualy went forward a bought his product. A measly 2. How can that be thought Bob. Maybe there were lots of people with questions who needed something clarified before handing over their hard-earned cash. So, off Bob goes to check his email.

Yes, as expected, there were lots of emails. But, the contents of the email were not people asking a simple question before buying Bobs product. The questions were mainly:-

• Did Bob need a larger pe%$#, well, you know what I mean
• Could Bob depoit the $800 in theor PayPal accout
• Could they sign-up to Bob's opportunity for free
• Could Bob get them a credit card
• Would Bob sign-up for their MLM opportunity

Bob was perplexed.

Time to go a take a closer look at the people who sign-up to the newsletter thought Bob.

Well, things became clear very quickly. I told you Bob is smart.

Over 90% of the people signing-up for Bob's Newsletter were people from far-far away in both time and economic resources - people with names like Adimoorthy Lakshmi Narasimhan - who do not possess a credit card and do not have the purchasing power to start and run Bob's opportunity.

Bob, had forgotten to target specific countries in his ad campaign. Bod had forgotten to remove "free" from his list of keywords. All of Bob's daily clicks were being used up in low income markets looking for freebies. Bob lost a bunch of money. Bob's wife was not very happy. Bob spent a very uncomfortable night sleeping in the dog house with Bruno the 150lb, drooling, slobbering rotweiler. Bob will never make the same mistake again.