You have choice to set and forget letting Adwords do it's job but if you want total control and are in a market that is highly competitive, you may want to manage your campaigns in a more hands-on fashion.

There is a trade-off for sure but it's up to you as a business owner to make that decision based on your own risk management criteria.

In marketing there is only one genius - your customer.

You can always hire someone to create great ads but you have no guarantees they will produce a winner straight off bat.

Only putting ad into wild will you determine results.

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You may peak in terms of achieving as high a CTR as you can for a particular advert and this could mean you get lazy and only show winner all time. To help keep your competitors guessing you should continually try new ads intermittently though.

Indeed therein lies some very valuable self help tips when it comes to keeping competitors guessing:

Believe it or not you may want to put a 'worse' advert up to reduce your CTR thus dropping you down adwords advert list to help improve your ROI!

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You are best using ad optimisation for most of your terms - set it, forget it. Some may need to be broken out into their own campaigns to give you granularity you require. It’s a question of finding out which keywords warrant extra effort.

Then you must really be prepared to test and test and test again. Even when you start to experience some minor successes with your articles, that is in fact time you should increase number of tests you are carrying out with your free articles marketing campaign.

Tests teach you a lot and with each new test you introduce, you learn something new and valuable that you can use to improve your business even more.

And what is more, when you have found a way to build up your opt-in email list as you go along (this can easily be done by offering some valuable information or e-course available only via email) you will actually be growing your client data base. Growing list of your prospects and clients whom you can email regular updates to later is extremely important.

It is important to ensure that your articles are both interesting and useful to your target market. Avoid any sales letter-approach here. In fact more you sound like an expert genuinely out to help, more successful your articles marketing campaign will be.

You can of course find loads of valuable information on how to write articles (even if you are not a writer) and where to post them at my blog. See resource box of this article for address.