The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Er, probably not.

But speaking of the sky… (how’s that for a segue?)… I often look up and wonder about all those planets orbiting around distant stars. I think about how everything in nature is a series of repeating patterns, endless cycles, fractals, and spirals. Nature repeating itself over and over.

And if you’ve been around long enough in this Internet marketing stuff, then you’ll have no doubt noticed some interesting patterns of your own.

Remember when Google created the Adwords platform?

If you don’t remember, or if you weren’t involved with this thing of ours back then, let me explain.

Up until that point, if you wanted traffic to your website then you’d have to rely on search engines, keyword stuffing, forum signatures and begging other sites.

Targeted traffic wasn’t that much of a consideration because we didn’t have an easy way to get any. Oh if only we could click a few buttons and traffic would come rushing in! Google was listening and our prayers were answered.

When Adwords came along they gave us a way to beat the corrupt SEO system. We could instantly put our sites right in front of the people we wanted to reach.

And the best thing of all; it didn’t cost much.

The return on investment for a high-converting page was obscenely good.

So what went wrong?

Because the placement of the ad was determined through bidding, the more people who used the platform, the higher the cost of clicks increased. No biggie really, that’s to be expected – it’s just the market deciding what the value of a product should be, normal stuff. But because most businesses had a similar ad budget, the prices wouldn’t go crazy. So there was enough room for everybody.

But what happens when you’re no longer competing with businesses that are a similar size to yours?

Well, it wasn’t too long before the big guys got wind of things.

They came rolling along with their hundred-million dollar ad budgets. You see, no longer were they buying double-page spreads in national newspapers and glossy magazines, nope, instead they were splashing their budget all over Adwords,