If like me, you’ve ever built a website and waited for visitors to arrive, there’s nothing more frustrating. And if you are selling a product, or even building an email list of potential customers, pay-per-click is the answer.

With a credit card and just $5 you can open a google adwords account, set it up with your keywords and adverts, and receive targeted customers arriving at your website looking for what you offer.

Google gets searched more than 250 million times every day. If you have ever searched on google you may have noticed a list of adverts, just 4 lines each, displayed on the right side of the page and labelled sponsored links.

These are google’s PPC (pay-per-click) adverts or adwords. Opening an account and starting an adwords campaign to promote your webpage is probably the fastest way to get visitors, but be careful, it can cost a lot of money.

Google adwords is not for the uninitiated. It’s a clever system with many ingenious features that rewards the smart advertiser. If you know what you’re doing your advert can be higher on the page, so it will get more clicks, and cost you less per click than the other advertisers are paying.

You can pay anything from $0.1 up to $10 per click for the really popular keywords. And the more relevant your advert to the searched phrase, the more it gets clicked, the higher google will display it and the lower your cost per click will be. Google rewards relevant adverts.

Adwords has many features; show your advert just in specific countries and cities, comprehensive keyword search tools, allowing 3 different adverts to show in rotation and showing you how many clicks each one gets, and the ability to compile different reports on your campaign results.

You can even use adwords for surveys. Run an advert to give away a free report. When a visitors clicks the advert and is directed to your webpage, present a form asking questions in return for the report. Use a service like ask database to build the form questionnaire, save and present the data in a format you can understand.

But if you want to build an adwords campaign that works, get some good advice. I recommend Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords. As he says, ‘you can write a couple of ads and get instant access to more than 100 million people in 10 minutes. It’s an awesome concept - but you can lose a bundle if you don’t know how it works’. I have read Perry’s guide from cover to cover and it’s excellent.

Read it if you want to learn how to use google adwords effectively.