Promoting your business with your own website is a great way to reach a vital part of the buying community, the online community. One of the easiest and most popular ways to get your product and branding out on the internet is to use Google Adwords.

Adwords is a pay per click advertising method in which you, as the promoter of your product or service can build, maintain and specify how you want your internet advertising to be controlled. Adwords adverts are placed on websites (and Google) when the keywords specified by your advertising campaign are searched for by a web user.

Adwords allows you to control the keywords or key phrases for which your advert will be shown, the amount you are willing to pay for each click of the advert, and how much you are prepared to spend per month on your advertising campaign. Advertising has never been as straight forward and cost effective.

Having been responsible for promoting websites over the past few years, and running Adwords campaigns for my own site as well as promoting for other site owners I thought I would share a few of the tips and tricks I have picked up along the way.

1. Try to always link directly to the product that you are selling. Sounds pretty obvious but a lot of larger sites send the user to their home page, this has a distinct disadvantage. The user has already searched for the product they require, and having to search from the index page to find the product all over again reduces the chance of a sale. If the advert goes straight to the correct web page and product the chance of a sale is dramatically increased. Within the settings of Adwords is the URL destination, always make sure the destination is the page specific to the advert. Sales will increase.

2. Try not to use highly sought after keywords (unless you have bags of money). If the keyword(s) you are bidding on have a lot of competition from other websites, try and use a specific key phrase instead. If for example you are selling "graphics cards" many other companies (big ones at that) will be willing to pay top dollar for such a highly used phrase placing your advert lower down the search results. The other drawback of such a broad key phrase is that a high percentage of your clicks will be people not wanting to buy graphics cards but using those two words in their search for other reasons than buying. I have found that using key phrases specific to the product had a much higher chance of a sale than a generic phrase, this is because the person searching is looking for that particular product and found it at your site through specific key phrases, its basically a targeted visitor, you advertise exactly what they are looking to buy. The other huge advantage to this method is you pay a lot less for the clicks in the first place.

These are just 2 quick and easy ways to improve your sales and reduce costs through Google Adwords. By ensuring the traffic you receive is the right traffic, and that the buyer can find what they are looking for straight away, your sales will increase and cost you less.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing and publishing more articles about how to get the best out of both Google Adwords and Google Adsense campaigns.