There's a lot of scams, smoke and mirrors, and creative material available on how to work from home with your own business.

But some is genuine, and there really are people you can trust, and valuable skills you need to learn about and acquire.

Having a website is the first, followed by getting visitors - traffic.

AdWords didn't exist yet, so I started to learn about SEO, Search Engine Optimisation. I bought a software program and started to read and practise.

I created some websites and started to actually get rankings, visitors, and clients. I still get a small amount of recurring passive income from these.

But I did make some serious mistakes along the way, like optimising a website for the wrong keywords!

I still have several first page rankings for these, even though now I realise they are not "money keywords" - keywords real people, looking to buy, are using.

Then, along came AdWords, and I tried it. I could get my ads up on the front page of Google in minutes - Wow!

Then, mysteriously they would disappear into oblivion.

In these early days, if your ad got lower than 0.05% clickthrough, it was disabled, and you had to *pay* Google to reinstate it.

Then of course, it would happen all over again.

I couldn't make it work, and it was proving costly and unproducive. So I put it aside for a while. This was December 2003.

Some months later, I accidently stumbled on a literally life-changing book.

It was "The Definitive Guide to AdWords" by Perry Marshall. It opened up for me a whole new world, and I learned more than just AdWords from it.

Anyway, the internal workings of AdWords suddenly became clearer, and I started to really understand how it worked.

Being an ex-engineer (very much like Perry) means I like to take things apart, understand how they work, put them back together again and if possible, improve the functionality too.

This is just what I do with my AdWords Audits so I can improve existing campaigns.

So the more I studied it, the more addicted I became.

Particularly as AdWords allows you to endlessly experiment with that most fascinating, enigmatic and frustrating of things - People!

Every AdWords ad you write is a psychological experiment. Some succeed, others fail. But all the data you generate is critically important.

What works, what doesn't. Gradual improvements, sometimes huge.

After a while, I was confident enough to offer my services to others who were at an earlier stage.

My very first client was a lady in Houston, in Real Estate. I had to figure out how much to ask her to pay me, and how to accept payment!

And it's grown from there. I now have more than 80 client accountsand I work with AdWords all day, every day, in some form or other.

This website is my way of documenting what I have learnt (and continue to learn - AdWords grows and changes all the time) and offering my experience to others.

Read it and enjoy.

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