With Google AdWords you can get to the top of the search engines almost straight away - for the first time in history, you can spend £5, write a couple of ads and instantly get access to over 100 million people - in less than 15 minutes.

AdWords is Googles Pay-Per-Click advertising system which puts paid search results in the “sponsored links” section at the top and the right hand side of the search results page. You design your own ad, decide what keywords to use to match your ads to your target audience, and decide how much to pay for them. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site.

You control how much you spend on the advertising - it only costs £5 to get started, then you decide on how much to pay for each click, and you can set a limit on how much you want to spend per day. If you were paying 10p per click, and had a daily limit of £2.00, then Google would deliver your ads to people who were searching for your keywords until 20 people had “clicked through".

Obviously a lot depends on choosing the right keywords - you don’t want to be paying for people to visit your site if they’re really looking for something you don’t offer. Google helps you with this with their keyword suggestion tool. You can have as many different keywords as you want, and you can review them, alter them, or delete keywords that are costing too much or not performing at any time.

You are billed monthly by Google, so it is advisable that you register with Google AdWords yourself, rather than have your web design agency do it for you. This way you are in control of your advertising spend - you can view your account online at any time, and monitor performance daily if you wish.

Getting started is easy, just go to adwords.google.com or click on the “see your message here” link at the bottom of the sponsored listings on Google. It may be the first and best thing to do to get traffic to your site.

But it’s not always as easy as I just made it sound - AdWords has some nuances, and some people have a rough time at first. Without planning and preparation, it is easy to throw money away on paying for the wrong kind of visitors. Equally, it is easy to spend very little and get no response.

AdWords expert Perry Marshall has written a very helpful e-course called “5 days to success with Google AdWords” and there’s no charge for it. You can find out about it here:

http://perrymarshall.com

By its nature, an adwords campaign needs regular monitoring and tweaking to achieve the best results,  This needs to be done by the website owner, who can monitor results and make decisions about advertising spend, rather than by the web designer.