If you have a brand new website and need customers overnight, then AdWords is your answer. You can also use AdWords to attract new customers and even test advertising ideas.
Google makes most of their money with AdWords, and if you are not careful you will be contributing a lot of your own money to their monthly profits.
At the time of this writing, the AdWords system is currently the best paid online advertising method. It's easy to create an account, create ads and pay them. The hope is that you will get lots of customers.
Here's how it works. The ads you create can be text ads, video ads, image ads, map ads and even tv ads.
You need to associate your ads with different words that you would like to target. Your ad will appear in front of someone when they type one of those words into a search engine.
Your ads will appear on many different websites when the information on that site relates somehow to your ad. For example, a few years ago several news websites reported on a loose diamond robbery at an airport in Texas. The ads on that page were all related to jewelry stores and BlueNile.
When Google AdWords appear on a website they are always identified with the words "Ads by Google" or "Sponsored Links." Unlike traditional advertising that charges you money just to place your ad, with AdWords you only pay money when someone clicks on your ad.
This form of advertising, whereby you only pay after someone clicks, is also known as Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC.
AdWords can be very expensive for highly competitive phrases. If you search "engagement rings" in Google you will see 14 Sponsored Links on the page, 4 of the top 7 ads belonged to BlueNile at a cost of about $1.85 per click. According to Google AdWords estimations BlueNile is spending about $1,200 per day for those ads.
DO NOT attempt to set up your AdWords on your own without first talking to a consultant, or taking some classes. You WILL lose your shirt!
