I've been having a play with adwords as a way of getting members for my forum and I have to say I am finding it reasonably successfull.

I am paying around $0.04 a click with a sign up ratio around 1:5 so it's costing me about $0.20 per new member however this is offset by many who choose not to join exiting the site via an adsense ad, generally for more than I paid for them in the first place - so I'm actually making money on the deal.

That's not bad at all!

What kind of keywords are you targetting, and what does you ad look like?

hehe - that would be like giving away the family jewels Let's just say it's a niche where I only have a couple of competitors so am guaranteed a top 1st page ranking.

LOL! True, I guess.

I tried using Adwords to get new members on some of my forums, but it never worked. I got traffic, yes, but no new members.

I think where it worked for me is the only competitors are mainly the really big players (heres a clue: one of them has just been bought for $600 million)
and a lot of people are looking for a more personal solution.