What does homework mean to you? Is it the same thing that my homeroom teacher used to say, “Do your homework please?” I’m not sure if my homeroom teacher ever used the phrase homework please in connection with doing school work, but I do remember her always looking at me like I had six heads and saying, “Do your homework please.” When I was a kid, this was one of the only ways I could show that I was getting something done. I would do my homework and she would make me do mine.

And do your homework my homeroom teacher? It means doing your research. I always say that when I do my research online, I get a lot of stuff done that way. The best way for Google AdWords to be effective, if you are doing your homework on your favorite topic, is to start building a student planner or blog or whatever, and keep adding content to it each day. You can also set up your Google AdWords account to do split test searches on the same topics.

So, do your homework my homeroom teacher. Use the tools that are on the right hand side of the search results. Start creating a blog or a student planner or an Ezine or whatever. Add new content each day. Keep track of your results and you will begin to realize the power of Google AdWords.

Here’s the key to using Google AdWords effectively for homework: When you sign up for your Google AdWords account, you have to create a keyword list of the topics you want to talk about using Google’s keyword tool. So, do your homework, and choose the keywords that relate to the topic of your assignment. These are called search terms. One word per search term works great. In my case, I use “homework help” and “homework.”

So, when someone searches for “homework help,” I choose one of those words and my ad appears on the first page of Google. When a user clicks on my ad, I receive a lot of traffic, a lot of people clicking on my links and a lot of students finding my site. I use this traffic I get to promote other related items on other sites and get free traffic too. This all creates backlinks for me, which Google loves. Which in turn makes my homework easier.

Of course, I am not promoting any specific product or service but the topic. I am simply using Google AdWords as a tool to drive traffic to a specific site. If that site happens to be a blog, then my homework becomes even easier because Google allows me to add a comment section below each of my keyword searches, which allows me to direct readers to the specific blog post that they might be looking for. That is a powerful combination.

But it does get complicated. One of my students asked me about this the other day. If you are a parent, what do you do when you find that your child is asking you a question about homework? Do you just keep giving her the same answer, over again? This seems to happen more all the time with younger children, so what do I do?

The answer is to make it personal. Give the student an option to tell you why he/she is looking for information on homework. You can then ask that person to re-phrase the question so that the solution is easy to understand. After doing this for a couple of weeks, I do notice that my grades improve a bit.