Dear friends,

Google, the most populated search engine on the Internet, offers a great advertising tool called AdWords.

AdWords was launched in March 2002 with a purpose of providing highly targeted advertising solutions to marketers and over a few years it has shows remarkable growth as far as the popularity is concerned.

How does the entire system work?

There is a simple 5 step process to carry out.

1)Select the geographical location, where you want your ad to get displayed.

2)Write the ad with Title, 2 lines of description and the display and destination URL's.

3)Select keywords that will trigger the ad .

4)Select the amount you wish to pay when and only when someone click on your ad.

5)Select the daily budget.

That's it and your ad starts running immediately.

I have seen traffic coming in less than 15 minutes. Since your ads get triggered because of the keywords you select, the traffic you are getting is highly targeted.

I have been using AdWords for almost 8 months and has seen a conversion rate of as good as 13%. This is not because I have good copywriting skills, but because of the excellent keyword selection facilities inside the AdWords system.

The success on AdWords is largely dependent on keyword selection. Tools such as overture, Worfdtracker are a great help for marketers.

The best part about the AdWordds systems is that more the number of people click on your ad, the lesser you have to pay. This clearly means that any average person can safely compete with big corporate players, paying much less and getting much more targeted traffic at the same time.

But before doing so it is extremely important to learn how to handle various keyword options inside the AdWords system. Because of the excellent keywords analysis abilities it is possible to get good results in the highly competitive markets as well.

Here are some of the more wonderful features of the AdWords system.

[x]The ability to PAUSE/RESUME you ad at any time. If you think that you are overspending on you ad campaigns, you

can immediately pause the ad campaigns.

[X]The ability to select geographical destinations such as selected countries or even cities in selected countries

[x]Real time tracking of clicks, impressions, cost ..(3 hours delay)

[x]The ability to turn on/off the participation in the Google AdSense program. Since AdSense ads are nothing but ads by those who are running AdWords ads. [x]Ability to select daily budget to avoid overspending.

[x]A robust keyword analysis system.

[x]Since there is a limit for the number of characters in the ads, it is much more exciting to put all your copywriting skills to test.

[x]Ability to create a hierarchy for ad campaigns, such as various "ad groups" inside a single ad campaign.

The main reason why AdWords campaigns give best results is because of the speed and highly targeted audience. In the field of marketing it is extremely important to test the results as early as possible.

But the real question is how to get the most out of these wonderful features? Because of the speed with which AdWords gives results, it is a best tool to collect opt-in subscribers, in short "building your list". Instead of selling directly to the audience it is wise to educate them more for pre-selling the product and then follow up by building a relationship first.

Now everyone is talking about "building your own list" and it's true. But here I have a slightly different logic for sending the AdWords traffic to an opt-in page.

Let's consider two situations.

Case 1>Tomorrow morning I come to your home and give away a pair of Nike shoes to you as a free gift.

Case 2>You go to a city mall and "buy" those same shoes by paying a price.

Now out of the two situations it is more likely that you will take good care of the shoes that you have purchased by paying money. Same is true with subscribers, when you pay to collect email addresses and names it is more likely that you will concentrate more toward building a rhythm with you prospects in order to get the ROI.

It's like trapping yourself into a mousetrap. Since you have invested some money, you must work at it and is the best way to tap the "goldmine" on the Internet.

That's it for now. Hope this information helps you and motivate you to give it a try.

Copyright 2005 Shrinivas Vaidya

AdWords is the registered trademark of Google Inc.