AdWords is so easy, it's complicated

Okay, so here was my thought process. Purchase clicks for cheap from AdWords to drive traffic to my sites. I get traffic, I make sales. Bada bing. Life is good. It's that easy.

Ahhh, but here is what is really happening. There are challenges to face and overcome. Is it really that easy for the rest of the world while I struggle with AdWords and making it work for me?

Challenge 1: Writing ad copy that actually generates click thrus. It seems that I get a lot of impressions and the click thru percentage is way weak.

Challenge 2: Converting the click thrus into actual sales or actions where I get paid. When I get 100 click thrus and not one click thru has converted into revenue, life's not that great. If I'm promoting an affiliate site, is the problem with the site copy or with my traffic?

Challenge 3: Promoting an affiliate site generally means competing against other affiliates and bidding for the same keyword phrases. In this scenario, I see two winners: Google and the site owner who has affiliates bidding against each other to get the traffic to try and make sales so they can get a commission.

So here's the million dollar question. How come some people can totally make AdWords work for them, while me with all of my internet know how - cannot? It's like a crazy puzzle that I'm trying to solve.

Here are some google adwords success stories.

But really, the one google adwords success story that holds the most water in my opinion is this one about a dude called shoemoney. He did a $10,000 pay per click experiment and was able to figure out the AdWords nut that I have yet to crack.

Here's a pic of shoemoney with a $132k google check. Keep in mind, this is a google adsense check. Revenue earned from placing google adsense ads on his sites. I have figured out adsense and how to make money as a publisher using adsense.

What I'm really trying to figure out is how to use adwords to drive traffic to my affiliate sites and for the commissions to be more than what I'm spending for the click thru traffic.

Adsense = publisher sells ad space and gets paid per click
Adwords = advertiser purchases clicks