Conversion Rates 1:50 via article marketing should i try...

Get Perry Marshall's book at Amazon on the ultimate guide to Adwords. ($12). If you are in a hurry, you can get the $197 definitive guide on his site, but the differences are subtle for the price difference, After 'getting' what the drill is, you are pretty much dealing with tweaking and what you spend for info returns less (IMHO), but a good solid foundation is probably a good idea.
One thing to drill in your head is "NEVER stop testing". Get that down and the campaigns will just continually get better ROIs. The testing info works in any PPC campaign, not just Adwords.
Then it just a matter of A/B testing until your costs are lower than your obtained client's LTV. If you are unable to get costs that low... drop it.

One thing to watch out for, put a daily spending limit on your campaign so you do not wake up and find you have spent 10K in clicks that didn't convert. Lol.

(if someone is buying clicks, it usually means they are making money. Once upon a time, one could make money with a single product. These days, many PPC users loose $ initially, but break even or profit from up/down/cross or OTO sales. Even then some will bid up clicks and not break even for months or years. If the average client stays a client 3 years and spends an average of 1K a year, spending 2K to get that client eventually pays off. Larger corps with deep pockets can use that fact to out bid smaller clients. The good thing is, few of those larger Adwords users (or any Adwords users) test, so it is possible, through A/B testing to spend 1/10th as much per click as they do, making it once again feasible to use PPC as a traffic source.

Well you can bid on those keywords that convert better...if you test you ll realize that there are keyword phrases that convert much better than others...speaking in general the more specific the keyword phrase is the more should convert...

I'll echo what the rest are saying: Give adwords a try

Control your budget and your keywords.

Test, test, test and focus on the high converting ads and keywords

Once you remove the losers, ramp up your campaign.