So about a year ago when I began my business as a wedding officiant, my business manager said I MUST sign up for Google Adwords.  I didn’t know a thing about it.  She has been an officiant for 22 years (Elope San Diego), however, and said that Google Adwords has helped her business immensely.  So she set me up and thank goodness she did because it was like Greek to me as I followed her instructions on getting started.  To this day I am eternally grateful for her help in those early days but that’s another post…

I ran my campaign for about 6 months until I realized that I was spending way too much on Advertising.  Other advertisers were contacting me and I kept having to turn them down because all my money was going to Google Adwords.  I mean we’re talking $500-600/month!  The wedding business slows down quite abit in the Winter.  It’s like someone turns the faucet off and the phone stops ringing and the e-mails stop coming.  I therefore made the decision to turn off or “pause” my campaign until I figured out how to make more money OR spend less on advertising.  It took one phone call for me to figure out what to do.  Talk about divine intervention.  An SEO company contacted me and told me they could get me on top for good doing what they do and they said they did it  very well.  Of course, my main concern was cost.  This all sounded so great!  So when they told me it would cost me $1,000/month a light went back on about Google.  I thought to myself, hey self, if these guys want to charge you $1,000 to do the same thing that Google was doing, maybe Google isn’t such a bad idea.  Or was it?  What I really needed to figure out was how to fine-tune my campaign and get the $500-600/month I was spending before down to about $250.  If I could do that, one booked wedding would pay for my campaign.  So I turned my campaign back on and for the last week I have been running reports and trying to analyze my campaign.  I went from running my campaign 100% of the time down to 37% and I am watching keywords very closely as I try to put myself in the shoes of my potential clients.  When they put in Wedding Officiant what and who comes up?  Well, if I play my Google Adwords cards right, I do.  And so far so good.  I have been getting very good results and I think it’s just going to get better.  The key thing with Google Adwords is that you can’t just set it up and walk away.  It’s a monster that has to be fed.  In other words, you have to work at it very hard.   For example, I sit down every day and look at the keywords that have been used the day before by users.  I then plug those very same keywords in to see what they see.  I’m still trying to figure out some stuff — like why aren’t all of my ads running?  For the life of me I can’t figure this out and have sent an inquiry to the Adwords team.  I am doubtful that I’ll hear back and therefore I continue to run reports and analyze this issue.  I’m sure there’s an answer and I’m going to find it!

In summary:  Google Adwords is the bomb if you don’t let it consume you.  You have to be very involved to make it work for you.  And I just happen to be very stubborn.   I highly recommend it but only if you’ve got the backbone to work through all the elusive details.