Amy and I have been working on advertising her Genealogy service and it's really hard. We're using AdWords and it only allows you so many letters per line. It feels like I'm writing Burma Shave ads or ad versions of Haiku.

When your trying to talk about genealogy, ancestry and headstones and you only have 35 characters per line, you lose a lot of real estate real quick. Google has some tips on their site, but they're not helpful for what we're having problems with. So we're planning on approaching this in a couple of different ways.

1. Explain the service. Obvious, but hard to do with so little space.
2. Try to grab attention. This is also hard to do with what amounts to a "boring service" like looking up genealogy records. It's not really all that exciting but I think the idea of not having to travel all the way to a city you don't know to get a couple photocopies can be attention grabbing if done right.
3. Make it creative. This is the Burma Shave approach. I don't know if it will work for us, but I plan on trying it. Something catchy, short and funny.

Well, we're running some ads now and I'll see how it goes. The one thing about really catchy ads is that people click on them. If they click on them and find out they don't want what we're selling, we're wasting money. So, I still want clicks getting people to the site, but I also want them to be interested in the service. This will be a tough balancing act. We've already had 140 impressions in one day but no clicks and I don't know if that's good or bad.

I'll see how we do.