Yesterday my husband and I were up early before the kids and we were contemplating our financial situation which is pretty bad at the moment.  My husband lost his last full time job at the CDC in March 2008 and we've been getting by on various freelancing projects since then, but not making quite enough and racking up the credit card balances, getting behind on our mortgage, and so forth.  The potential to relieve that is a huge reason why I'm here.  My husband hasn't been able to find another job and neither of us really want that grind anyway.

We are Christians and believe God is leading us and will provide for us and we do pray about how to pay the bills quite often.  My husband shared with me that he believes God will continue to provide for us but not through the "normal" channels, which include things like getting a job, relocating either for a job or to move in with family, or going on welfare.  I'm encouraged by that statement and say I hope it happens soon.

Later that day I picked up the mail and among the overdue bills and junk mail is this letter from JustHost, the company that hosts a website I've owned since January.  In the letter is a coupon code to sign up for a new AdWords account and get a credit for $100.00.  I've picked up enough info on PPC from WA that I know $100.00 can go a long way if you manage your ad campaigns right and decided to jump on the offer.

Today I went through the registration process and followed so many PPC training tutorials here they're starting to run together.  I entered the coupon code, and lo and behold, I have a $100.00 credit in my new AdWords account!  Working through the tutorials I set up a single ad for Clearwater Lodge using a keyword that gets 260 monthly searches but only has three other ads (and what do you know, I just checked it and my ad is now the only one on the page!).  I believe each click will cost me around 5 cents and I set a budget for $2.00/day.  If that's the only ad I run it can go for fifty days or more, and that's a long time for no money down.  More than likely I'll play around with other ad campaigns.

Now here's the funny thing, and the part of the story that makes me view this as totally God's provision (in aforementioned unusual way).  First, please don't think I'm imposing my religious views on anyone--I'm really just sharing, but I am excited so take it for what it is :-).  Remember I said I've owned this website on JustHost since January?  I joined WA just about a month ago in mid-July.  This letter could have come to me at any time between February and now, and yet it came yesterday.  It was a limited time offer with about two weeks to act on it.  Before I joined WA I wouldn't have known what to do with such a letter and would have probably ignored it.  But today, I view it as a $100.00 gift.  I wasn't planning to get into AdWords right away, but with $100.00 credit I'd be silly not to.  I know exactly what to do with it.  Sure, I needed to take some training but I knew exactly where to find it and that it would be good.  Now I'm trained and feel I'll do a good job with my ad campaign, turning that $100.00 into much more...

And I'm still going to work on the article marketing and the Squidoo lenses.  In fact I spent time yesterday interviewing the owners of Clearwater Lodge and their Grandma about her first muskie catch.  This week I'll be putting a few blog posts together to launch my Muskie blog.  Looking forward to that.

But for now, I'm extremely grateful to God for the gift of AdWords.