If you want to make money with Adwords, you will need to keep up to date with the new strategies that are constantly appearing, as well as keeping pace with the changes that Google makes to its Adwords policies.

In 2007 it was ‘kill your competitors’ with Day Job Killer and then the many and varied spy systems that tracked your competitors’ ads so that you could copy them and blast them out of the water. Some of these systems were on a hugely expensive membership plan.

Almost at once, people who could not afford the Adwords spy systems or were tired of the constant fighting for search engine placement began looking around for new ideas. Early in 2008 we saw the first signs of what they had found. In fact it was not new, but a rediscovery of something that had been considered dead - the Adsense content network.

If you have come to Adwords in the last couple of years, you may not know that the search and content networks were once united. Google separated them to give advertisers more control in the days when click fraud was common. Most advertisers immediately (and rightly) turned off the content network for their ads.

However, times have changed and click fraud is no longer a serious problem. Google now shuts down any Adsense account suspected of ‘invalid clicks’. This is bad news for the Adsense site owners who can now be put out of business by any bored visitor who repeatedly clicks on their ads. But for Adwords advertisers, it means that the content network is up for grabs again.

There are several advantages of using the content network instead of the search network. Firstly, the cost per click is usually lower. Secondly, you do not have the same fight for space with your competitors, and thirdly, you have a lot more control. You can pick out the exact sites that you want your ad to appear on.

The last point here is vital and it is strongly recommended that you specify target sites for all of your ads when you are using the content network - and not just the sites, but the precise pages of that site.

Just like with the search network, you need to avoid having people click when they are not really interested, and you do that by picking out pages that are very closely related to your product. For example if you are promoting a dog training ebook, you will want your ad on a site about dogs but only on the dog training pages.

It is also better to limit your advertising to sites that display their Adsense above the fold - that is, the ads are visible on the screen without scrolling down. Toward the top left of the screen is the hottest area, that’s where you really want your ad to be.

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