Websites thrive on traffic. Business websites need customers. Blogs need consumers to read them and subscribe.

As a website owner, you'll probably spending a large portion of your time driving traffic to you website. There are several ways to bring traffic. You can optimize pages for the search engines. You can write articles and submit them. You can use social networking to build relationships on the internet.

One very important method of driving traffic is Google Adwords. Adwords has one important difference from all the other methods mentioned. Adwords costs money. You design an ad for your website, and then Google places your ad on their search engine results, in the paid or sponsored links section. You pay Google every time someone clicks your ad.

However, Adwords has advantages that offset the costs. Why should you use Google Adwords to drive traffic? What are the arguments for Adwords?

1) Google Adwords will start sending your website traffic immediately.
It takes time for a website to rank high enough to appear on organic search results. It takes time to write articles and submit them. It takes time to build a social network. All the other methods of driving traffic require an investment of time. These alternatives require hours of work to establish, and then may take weeks or months to show results.

Adwords will start sending traffic to your website today. As soon as you create a campaign and an ad, you can begin getting traffic.

2) Google will help you every step of the way.
Google makes a significant portion of their revenue from Adwords ads. Google makes money by you participating in Adwords and wants you to succeed. Google publishes user guides, blogs and other information to make using Adwords as easy as possible.

3) Adwords provides the information about your campaign that you need to succeed.
Adwords provides keyword research tools so you know what consumers are searching for. Adwords helps you evaluate your campaign after it is created. Adwords supplies you with the impressions, click through rates and costs of you campaign. It informs you of the Quality Score for your ads, on a scale of 1 to 10. It offers advice on how to improve the Quality Score.

4) You can control the cost of Adwords with the proper strategy.
Knowing how to obtain a good Quality Score for your ad can reduce your cost per click. A well optimized campaign can deliver traffic for just a few cents per click. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide describes step by step how to optimize your ads.

5) Anyone can obtain the top ad positions.
Adwords values quality over price. Adwords doesn't simply award the highest ad position to the highest bidder. The ad quality score is the primary factor in ad positions. That means you can advertise in highly competitive markets, using a good Quality Score to beat out other advertisers who are simply spending more. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide reveals exactly how to get a good Quality Score.

Internet Marketing is not easy. You may find it hard to get an internet business up and going. Here are some reasons why internet businesses fail.

1. No one wants your product.
You should really concentrate on a market and audience, not a product. When you find a market of consumers who have a need, and you can fill that need for them, you are on your way to success. Rather than selling, you are just standing in front of the traffic and letting it come to you.

Take a note from Bert Ingley who makes well over six figures a year selling Madden Football information online. Bert himself will tell you he visited Madden Football sites, chatted with players, and posted in forums long before he had a product. He came with his product AFTER he learned what the people in his market wanted and needed.

Could you do the same? How much to you know about your potential customers? Google you own keywords. Visit related websites, even your competition and see what people are saying. Post on forums. Chat with people. Answer email questions. The more you know about your potential customers, the better you'll be able to market to them.

2. Talking about features, not benefits.
You probably concentrate on features of your product or service in every other aspect of business. You are probably adding features to product as the market demands or standards change. Many of your thoughts may be feature oriented.

In marketing, you never want to talk about features. Instead, you need to talk about what the feature will mean to the customer. Will it save them time? Will it make their task or life easier? Will it save them money? These types of things are benefits. In your marketing, you want to talk about benefits, not features.

3. Trying to do it all yourself.
Many times you may try to do it all yourself. You may not want to relinquish control or spend the money on outsourcing.

But, back to Bert Ingley again, he hired a professional writer very early on. Sure Bert new his product and his market. However he also knew that others were more knowledgeable and also better writers. Bert outsourced the writing and he concentrated on the marketing.

4. Not being patient.
Internet marketing is not easy. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to write articles, build an email list and split test messages.

Adwords began calculating Quality Scores for ads for each consumer search in the later half of 2008. Part of the new calculation is page load time. You'll learn What is page load time, how does it affect your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What does page load time mean?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render after it is requested. The life cycle of a page is straight forward.

1) The request for the page is made

2) The server will perform any server side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database. When the page is completely constructed, it will proceed to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server side rendering, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages have server side processing.

3) The server begins transmitting the response over the internet

4) The client computer receives the response

5) The client begins rendering the response in a browser window. Additional requests are made for flash scripts, graphics and javascript.

6) When the page is completely rendered, and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.

Adwords must really be measuring the time from the request until the response is read. I doubt Google can actually be attempting to time to render the page on the client, and make the child request for graphics and so forth. Google would have to add some javascript code to the page in order to know when the client side rendering was complete. I seriously doubt they would do this.

How does it affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time.

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down Advertisers using server side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. A server side redirect would be when the destination url is requested, the server side scripting language redirects the request to another url. This really performs two request, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page is an advertisement page that is shown (briefly) before the content, and may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes to much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.

What can you do to improve your page load time?

1) Optimize your server side scripting
If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database, and your code for speed.

2) Get dedicated web hosting
Most cheap web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites from many website authors are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, like bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow your page load time. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides at. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.

3) Compress the size of your page
A web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer over the internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing whitespace. You can remove any unncessary HTML tags. You can use relative urls instead of absolute urls. Do anything to decrease the size of the file.

4) Lose the Flash Animation
Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side, so it may not factor into the Page Load time. But then again it may. Either way, Flash animation tends to be slow, so get rid of it for the sake of your customers. Sure it looks great, but you can't afford to lose sales because nobody waits around for the Flash animation load.

5) Strip out unnecessary elements from the page
Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize javascript or CSS includes. Additional requests need to made for these files, so keep it to a minimum.

6) Optimize your page
As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout.

Cookie Stuffing is a dubious method of generating Affiliate sales. Affiliates who use cookie stuffing are hoping to get commissions on sales they did not make. It is a method of affiliate fraud.

Marketplaces like ClickBank exist to help merchants promote products. The idea is that an affiliate marketer will promote a product, and in return for his expense, time and effort the merchant gives him a percent of the sale. ClickBank makes every effort to protect the effort of the affiliate marketer. ClickBank has a policy that if a consumer visits an affiliate marketers website and leaves, the affiliate will still get credit for the sale if the consumer comes back to purchase the product in 60 days. The affiliate will get credit if consumer makes the purchase up to 60 days after the initial contact. This protects the affiliate since many consumers do not make purchases on the first visit.

ClickBank has to track the consumer for 60 days to enforce this policy. It is done through a cookie. A cookie is a piece of information stored on the consumer's computer. The cookie is written to the consumers computer when the affiliate website is browsed, and the "hoplink" is clicked. The cookie records that the affiliate was responsible for the sales lead. The cookie remains on the consumer's computer for 60 days. Should the consumer return and purchase the product, the cookie is read and the original affiliate receives credit for the sale.

The presence of the cookie is what has lead to cookie stuffing. The premise is to write ClickBank cookies on a visitor's computer without the visitor's knowledge. Should that visitor happen to purchase a product in 60 days, the affiliate will get credit for a sale.

For example, imagine a blog comment or a forum post where an affiliate has managed to place an image tag that points to his hoplink. The affiliate wants these image tags to be on pages with high amounts of traffic. Every visitor who views that page will see a broken image tag. Behind the scenes, the ClickBank cookie with the affiliates code has just been written to the visitor's computer. Any high traffic website will do. The more people that view the page, the more cookies will be written. Should any of these visitors happen to purchase the product in 60 days the affiliate will get the credit for the sale.

The affiliate marketer simply has to spam as many websites as possible with his image tag (or javascript popup or iframe tag). The more people that end up with his cookie, the more sales he'll get credit for.

All affiliate programs are vulnerable to this type of fraud. ClickBank and other market places will ban affiliates for this practice. However, it may take some time before the fraud is noticed. In addition, cookie stuffers constantly find better means of hiding their tracks.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, avoid the Content Network. A seasoned Adwords user may use it, but track your ROI closely. I'm willing to bet you aren't getting much. If you are beginner, stay away from the Content Network. Some other marketer will tell you to separate bids for Search and Content, but that just doesn't address the underlying problem.

The reason to avoid the Content Network is the poor quality of traffic. Content Network traffic is traffic from Adsense Publishers. Adsense Publishers are individual websites that have put up Adsense ads and are collecting revenue for every click.

The problem is that Adsense Publishers don't care about the quality of traffic they send. I'm speaking from experience, as I participate in Adsense. The prevailing school of Adsense thought is to make your Adsense ads blend into your content. As a publisher, you don't want visitors to recognize the links as ads. The goal here is to make it look just like a regular link, and not an ad to another website. In other words, you are tricking the consumer. This is a completely valid Adsense tactic and is in wide use. But, consider the visitor who got tricked into clicking the link. How motivated is that visitor? Do you think that confused visitor is likely to provide any ROI?

In addition, all kinds of less than valid tactics have been employed to get Adsense clicks. The most common a few years back was to place graphics over the ads, which makes the links look less like ads and further confuses visitors. Other tactics include make Adsense ads look like navigation links. I'm sure you've seen these that look like navigation tabs or a left navigation menu.

Next you have the Adsense farm or Made for Adsense websites. These are the websites that are nothing but Adsense ads. Here are a few examples...

• best3websites.com
• ToSeekA.com
• seekful.com

Are you seriously going to pay for traffic from these spam websites?

Finally there is the fraud issue. We've all heard of the fraud that occurs with Adsense. I've read that 30% of clicks may be fraudulent, but I have no evidence to support that number. But, I can guarantee that there is some fraud happening. You simply can't avoid it entirely.

Here is a quote from a comment by Michael Martinez on Matt Cutts blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/better-click-tracking-with-auto-tagging/

Just separate search bids from content bids. Every time someone recommends the Content Network, they acknowledge the above problems, but then they say just separate the bids like it is a cure all. That doesn't address the quality issues. The traffic is not going to convert. Sure, you can pay $0.05 per click versus $0.50 per click, but you are still getting low quality. Do you want to throw away even $0.05 per click or would you rather not participate?

Rick Strahl rants about his poor quality traffic on his blog http://west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/302826.aspx.

If your advice is to use the Content Network or simply separate the bids, you are going to have to produce the statistical evidence that you are getting an ROI from the Content Network.

Use a placement campaign instead. The alternative to the pure Content Network campaign is the placement campaign. Adwords allows you to hand pick the websites your ads will appear on. You can pick reputable websites that prominently display ads. Reputable websites do not engage in click fraud. You can weed out all of the Made for Adsense websites.

I recommend you just opt out of the content network. If you want Adsense traffic, use a placement campaign. If you simply must use the Content Network, track your ROI and watch it close. Make sure you are getting a return on your investment.