Google Adwords - Payed for Listings
Everything I have talked about so far concerning SEO is very time consuming. For the majority of businesses getting a top listing on Google for relevent keywords takes alot of work, time and money. You need to be very patient or youll likely give up before you see any results!
If you want something more short-term Google Adwords is a great place to start. You may have noticed when you perform a search on Google, you have the main listings on the left hand side of the page, but you also have several listings on the right-hand side - people pay for those listings to be there, and in fact evry time you click on one of those listings, the owner of that site is paying a certain amount.
Google Adwords is based on a simple but very effective idea: you pick your keywords and when someone types in that keyword your advert is displayed on the right-hand side. Everytime someone clicks on your advert, you pay Google a certain amount - based on what position your add is displayed, what market there is for your product/service etc. The reason this idea works is that as long as you pick the right keywords, you will only be paying for visitors targeted to exactly what you are offering, and as long as you have designed your website well, and you are offering a service worth purchasing then you should be on to a winner.
The technique for implementing Google Adwords is very similar to that I have discussed previously concerning SEO. You pick and refine a list of keywords/phrases and then you set these phrases up in Google Adwords. Much like Search Engine Optimisation, you need to pick your keywords carefully because depending on how much competition there is for a particular keyword, the cost per click can range from 5p to upwords of £5.
The best way to start is by setting yourself a small daily budget (Google will help you to do this) adding a few keywords (Give each a low Maximum cost per click) and see how things go - Adwords can be a great tool when paired with a visitor monitoring package such as Statcounter. Depending on the success of you campagin you can refine it as time goes by. An you will find there are several ways you can hone in on your target audience including Daily Budgets, Ad-Scheduling and Location-selection (for example if you opperate a local business you can target your adds within say a 10 mile radius of your operating area).