The quickest way to get visitors to come to your site is with advertising. And the quickest way to get started in on-line advertising is to use Google AdWords. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also the quickest way to give Google a lot of money.

Using Google AdWords is usually the first thing you want to use to drive traffic to your website. Because with AdWords, you can find people who are interested in exactly what you have to offer. You do this by bidding on the words that your customers are typing into Google Search. You’ll also want to choose “negative” keywords that exclude users who are not interested in your offering.

Then you test your ads and keywords to find out which ones are working and which ones aren’t. If you set it up right, AdWords will tell you exactly how much each new customer costs, and exactly which ads and keywords are the most cost-effective.

But that’s not the best part about AdWords. The best part is that you can get this data almost in real time. Therefore, you can adjust your keywords and ads quickly. And by so doing, you can learn what words and ideas your customers respond to, before your competitors discover this. This is valuable knowledge you can use in other marketing channels. AdWords lets you do this faster and more inexpensively than any other system available today. Used well, AdWords is the fastest, most effective way to get high-quality leads and information, wicked cheap. The power of AdWords is that with 5 dollars and 10 minutes, you can have your own ad being shown to millions of people.

And the danger of AdWords is that with 5 dollars and 10 minutes, you can have your own ad being shown to millions of people. Used poorly, AdWords is the fastest, most effective way to give lots of money to Google. Please don’t do that. There are enough horror stories of someone opening an AdWords account, naively setting up an ad campaign, forgetting about it, and ending up with a $5000 charge at the end of the month and not one sale. Instead of doing that:

• Use the Google AdWords Standard Edition. Avoid the Starter Edition, because it doesn’t provide the features you need to run an effective campaign.
• Determine to become acquainted with the features of the Standard Edition.
• Start with a limited budget. Don’t just accept Google’s recommendation for how much to spend. Invest a little, and learn a lot.
• Start with a small set of closely-related keywords, monitor your ad campaign daily, and improve it over a number of weeks.
• Get Perry Marshall’s free email course, “5 Days to Success with Google AdWords.” This will give you a taste of what’s in the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords.