One of the most common misconceptions about Google advertising is that it is too expensive or that your competition will just sit and click on your ad.

So do you want to hear the truth?

Search engine marketing on Google is still alive and kicking, as a matter of fact the big guys not only swear by it, they post their results for everyone to see. Talk about some outstanding results! It is no wonder why you see big name companies working Google AdWords and not worrying so much about their natural ranking.

Here is a link to just a few testimonials for Google:

http://www.google.com/ads/success.html

What you will see is what a good Google AdWords set up can do for your business.

Now, you may have opened an account in the past, blown through a couple of bucks, and you have completely written off advertising on Google.

Guess what? I caught you reading. That means that you are still a little curious about how it all works and how you can use it to your advantage.

Would more visitors, more conversions, and more cash interest you?

You see, it is simply all about getting the right keywords, tweaked just the right way, and the knowledge to see the patterns on what keywords actually bring the best conversions.

The bottom line is, and always will be, all about the bottom line! How many visitors actually turn into buying customers? The answer to that question should be well above 1%!

See now were talking…you don’t need deep wells of money to throw at a marketing experiment. Here’s the deal, if you want the conversions, you just have to know a few simple tricks.

1. Research your keywords: With Google the tool is to do this is integrated into the actually building of your ads.
2. Pick a budget: It doesn’t matter if your budget is $10 a day or $100 a day.
3. Pick a test target: This is where you evaluate your campaign; a couple of good breaking points might be every $100 or every $200.
4. Stick to it: Here is the hard part, watching $100 drain out of an account and not getting enough conversions to even come close to breaking even. HOLD ON! This is where most will throw in the towel and never look back…but keep going.
5. Evaluate test: You have spent the $100, now see what keywords actually brought conversions, which ones did absolutely nothing for you, and which ones brought visitors without conversions. Take out the ones that didn’t work and add some new ones.
6. Stick to it: Once again watch your $100 come out of the account, but this time the damage shouldn’t look as bad. You might not be breaking even yet, but you are probably a lot closer.
7. Evaluate test: Take the time to once again evaluate your ads and keywords, keep the winners, and dump the losers.
8. Stick to it: No, I am not kidding you…run this again, another $100 with your new keywords and ads.
9. Evaluate test: This result should be a lot closer to what you want. If probably even broke even this time.
10. Stick to it: I know, I know you think you get this by now, but give it one final whirl at the $100.
11. Evaluate test: This time, I’m sure you will see that you broke through and your ad is now pulling you in conversions.
12. Put in maintenance mode: Evaluate every month or every quarter, whatever makes sense for you, and make changes based on what you see.

This is just a basic frame work you can use to run a test to see if a market is right, if your message is right, and if you have the right combination of keywords. I recommend that you try different wording, otherwise known as split testing, to see which combination of words prove to be the most effective.

You can also take this one step further and improve your chances of converting if you have special landing pages for each ad. This allows you to target a very specific audience with your keywords you choose, the ad, and finally the actual page they land on.

As you can see, most will fail because they give up way too soon in the process. Any marketing effort needs to have a test period and those test periods don’t come for free. As long as you understand that from the beginning and you are prepared to see a result of spending $100 with absolutely no conversions, but knowing that by pressing on it will get better, than you really are ready to give Google AdWords a REAL try.