google ad words

I have someone working on a site for me. He's got his own ideas about optimizing it. I have no idea what they are

I have to disagree. Google adwords has been my single best marketing to date. It costs me about
$40-$60 per month and pulls about 6-10 paying jobs per month. Where most people mess up is by making the keywords too general and by not setting it up so that only local people who search can see the ad. My website is homemade, nothing special about it at all. I was able to start getting work directly from the site within days of publishing it. I do intend to cut back or quit the adword program when my site gets to the top of google organic searches but that takes time. Right now I'm listed number 1 in yahoo,lycos, and msn but I'm coming up at 5-10 in google. The website costs me less than $80 per year total. I built it myself and optimize it myself. I'm no internet marketing guru. I had never built a website. If I can do it anyone can. When I bought the web space it came with a very easy to use program for building your own website. As far as optimizing goes, there is no need for any carpet cleaning company to pay someone big bucks to optimize your site. "Carpet Cleaning Your City" is not going to be a highly competive search term. It took me about 2 months to get to #1 on yahoo, etc. Google is taking longer but I'm steadily moving up the rankings. It only takes a willingness to research how to do it.

Yes, but if your new to the business it has to come form somewhere it's easy for someone thats been in the business for years and say the its a waste of time because they have regular custys not saying you should depend on it but 10 calls here and 10 call there add up! I know I get way more calls form the net than the phone book and they don't ask questions, they just book a time. Of course I'm just a part timer 20-25 jobs a month is about all I can handle.

duh who said internet is a waste?

67% of all serches are done through Google. How is that a waste? But maybe with the merger yahoo might creep up?

Is that good?  Does that mean for every 18 impressions you get 1 click-thru? 

Of is it for every click-thrus you get 1 sale?

Anyway do have the ROI (return on investment) calculated?  This is getting real informative. 

Yeah, phonebooks are phonebucks for the publisher only. 

So how do you find out where they heard about you?  I take it you ask and then track the answers.