Biz.net is a made-up sales-driven company, with telemarkers and sales supervisors in place of advertising managers and Adwords specialists. There's a pyramid-style chain of commissions, and customers pay this pyramid with monthly credit card payments. 

A salesperson adds value by introducing you to a service, and your monthly payments ensure that other salespeople will add similar value to other businesspeople. If you are inclined, you can become a salesperson yourself, now that you've had first-hand experience, and get yoru own extra source of monthly income.

You've seen ads for this sort of service. They started out very tacky. Now they're a little less tacky. Here's how to spot one:

• They tell you it's NOT Pay-Per-Click (it IS Pay-Per-Click)
  
• They give you FREE ADVICE (your advisor is a telemarketer)
• They promote their "no contracts" policy as a BENEFIT
  
• They don't provide straight answers to technical questions.
• They promote add-ons that are really free trials to affiliate services.

No-Value Markup

The reason Biz.net says it service is not pay-per-click is that your next question would be, "well, how much are those clicks costing me?"  If you knew that you were being re-sold $15 of clicks for $100, you might wonder why that made sense. But if you asked, you'd be told "This isn't pay-per-click, it's a monthly fee!."

Non-Expert Advisors

Any Adwords manager worth his salt can set up a campaign for you in a half hour that will generate more traffic than Biz.net, which relies on automated software.  However, your salesperson will be glad to suggest keywords and ad text for you, and if he has worked with many other customers in your "vertical market" (e.g. residential real estate), he might know enough to sound helpful.

No Service Contracts

Who gets protected by the contract: the person getting automatic deductions every month, or the company doing the billing?

An Adwords manager has a few ways to earn his keep: pay-per-performance (he gets paid a proportion of your profits from the ads), flat fees (your $500/month for his advice and management does not include what you are paying Google), and consulting fees (which start at $150/hour and go way up from there). In each of these situations, there is a stated service he is providing, which you pay for.

No Straight Answers

Because there are no contracts, and because the burden is on the customer to figure out that he is spending too much, Biz.net has nothing to lose by making up stories about "bulk rates" and other things.  My favorite explanation is this: If you ask for a keyword that is so expensive (like "dwi lawyer," for example) that three clicks wouild use up the whole $100, your representative will say, "We've already promised that term exclusively to another of our customers in your zip code, so we can't sell it to you.  Would you prefer 'cryogenic suspension lawyer'?"

No-Value Extras

The whole point of search marketing is to have your ad appear when someone is looking for a product you sell.  When I spoke to the Biz.net tech about how to justify pay-per-click ads without reports that include cost-per-click, he began lauding the other aspects of the service bundle. 

These extras included having the ads appear on content placements (which my client would have no control over), the possibility of connecting to an online store (which he did not need) and other 'but wait, there's more!" things of that kind.

ENOUGH.

This is all easy to test.  Call your flavor of Biz.net and ask them these sorts of questions, if you have the time.  If you don't, start off on the right foot with Fat Free Google, a service that keeps itself honest.