After opening up a checking account with Wachovia and transferring $100 to it, I was ready to create the Google AdWords account.  (I get very excited by these little things!)

The first question in the whole AdWords process is what email address I want to use.  This may seem like a trivial question to some, but to me it was a dooozy.  Do I create a new GMail account (I already have one for my personal use)?  Do I create an email address in the iKollect.com domain and use that?  Do I use one of those “I don’t want junk mail so I am using this email address which gets lots of spam” email address?  Do I use my existing GMail address?  Do I use another email address?  Ugh.

In the end, I decided to create another GMail account and use that one.  My decision was based totally on the old eenie-meenie-miney-moe method (I’m sure I spelled that incorrectly).  I was spending so much time on deciding which email address to use that I wasn’t accomplishing the task I actually wanted to accomplish.  So I may be angry with myself for having yet another email address to keep track of, but oh well.

After creating the new GMail account, the first thing I did was to go into the GMail account setting and set it up to forward everything to my other primary email address.  Then I went to work on setting up my new AdWords campaign!

I had already decided that I wanted my advertisement to look something like this:
 
  [ Free Coin Inventory Software ]
  [ Free Web-based coin Collecting Software ]
  [ http://www.ikollect.com ]

I had also already set up a smart PHP landing page on my website to handle the traffic that came from the Google advertisement.  That looked something like this:

  http://www.ikollect.com/ landhere.php?camefrom=Google&subject=Coins

So creating the ad in AdWords was pretty straight forward.  I won’t go into too many details on how it all worked because there are several things you have to memorize regarding rules on what about AdWords you can tell other and what you cannot share.  If you don’t follow all the rules, they can suspend your account, and we certainly didn’t want that!

I already had my checking account Wachovia set up, so that part was easy.  The only bummer was that when I linked the account up, I realized that I had to wait several days for the account to be verified.  That was a total bummer because other online banking sites I’ve been to lately have allowed me to verify instantly.  I’m not sure if this is a limitation of Wachovia’s site or Google’s or maybe some crazy law that keeps people from stealing my massive quantities of money (did I mention that it’s up to $150?).  But nevertheless I had to wait. 

So wait is what I’m doing now.  But not patiently…I’ve checked several dozen times in the past couple of hours hoping that I could proceed, but no such luck.  After the verification is complete, I believe I’ll be able to activate my ads!