This article is an introduction and overview to using Google AdWords to generate sales leads online.

Google AdWords is probably the fastest way to get in front of your potential customers when they're looking for what you sell.

The process works like this:

You put a free giveaway on your website and require your visitors to register before gaining access for your free giveaway. When your visitors register you're gaining a lead and they're gaining your free valuable giveaway. It's a win-win situation.

Once your free giveaway is on your website you open a Google AdWords account, write an ad that clearly promotes your free giveaway, choose keywords related to your offer, then when your potential customers click on your ad you send them directly to your web page containing your free offer.

4 Steps to Generating Sales Leads Using Google AdWords.

1. Design Your Giveaway (Lead Generation Magnet). Giveaway something of true value here. Demos, trials, white papers, and how-to guides tend to work best.

2. Create your landing page. Your landing page will contain a strong headline that clearly describes the main benefit(s) of your free giveaway. This is your chance to create desire for your free giveaway. Now place an overview paragraph below your headline desribing your offer in a bit more detail. Next put a few beneift driven bullet points that tell your visitor what he or she is going to get by registering. The last thing on your page will be your registration form. When your visitors fill out this registration form they'll be taken to your "thank you page" that contains your offer. Keep this page as simple as possible, remember you're main goal is to get the registration.

3. Create a Google AdWords account. Once your account is created you want to setup an ad to promote your free giveaway. Put the URL of your landing page that you created in step 2 as the destination URL of your ad. This is where you'll send your traffic. Choose a few keywords that are highly related to your free giveaway. Set your daily budget and maximum cost per click.

4. Setup conversion tracking. You want to see how many leads your getting, and how much it's costing you to generate each lead. This is how you're going to guage your Return On Investment (ROI). Google offers a free tool in your AdWords account called "conversion tracking". Take the small snippet of code that Google gives you and place it on the page that shows up after someone registers on your landing page. This page is often referred to as your "thank you" page. Put the Google conversion code in the HTML of the "thank you" page.

Conslusion:

Once you've completed these 4 steps you should start to see leads coming in. It is very important that you keep a close eye on your AdWords account. Monitor it daily and make improvements over time. You'll likely want to test new keywords, ad copy, and landing page concepts. This type of testing is referred to as "optimization". Your success depends on successful optimization over time.