Do you know that all it needs is 95 characters to survive on the internet. Online world is not at all different than usual offline world, what we call the real world. Google the busiest search engine on the internet started to sell advertising space on the search engine result pages from March 2002. Instead of talking about this system let's try to answer a few questions.

* How does the system work?

It's very simple to understand. You go to Google.com, do a search and when the search results show up, apart from the normal search results Google also shows the ads of those advertisers who have decided to pay for that particular keyword to Google. The "paying" process in this case is called as a "bid"

* how much are the bids on keywords?

This is very difficult to answers. It is just like real estate rates, they entirely depend upon demand and supply of information for which the keyword is associated to.

But one very important point here is Google AdWords is a Pay Per Click system. This means it costs nothing to just show up your ads on the google search results pages. But if someone clicks on your ad, Google will charge your credit card the bid mount that you have selected.

* What kinds of ads can I write?

These are normal text ads. 25 characters for Title, 35 characters for first description line and 35 characters for the second description line. These total to only 95 characters (including spaces) That's it you get only 95 characters to show your creativity. Below these Google will normally display the website address.

* How much time does it take to show up the ads on the search result pages?

Instantly. The moment you save your ad in the account panel, your ads becomes "active" and depending upon the demand for the keywords you have selected, you start receiving traffic to your website.

* How many keywords can I bid on for a given ad.

It entirely depends upon how much targeted traffic you want to your website. It is quite obvious that more keyword will expose your ad to more search results and thus you can expect more traffic.

The AdWords system has a facility to create ad groups within your account and each ad group can take up to 1000 keywords.

This was just an overview of the Google AdWords system for beginners. I hope it will help you to study in depth more AdWords strategies that can create wonders for your online business.

Copyright Shrinivas Vaidya

AdWords is the registered trademark of Google Inc.