Are You Familiar With Google AdWords?

I’ve known about Google’s AdWords service for a while, but recently a client asked me to ramp up their AdWords campaigns, and I needed to refresh my knowledge and get back into the game.

If you don’t know, AdWords drives those right-side-of-the-page paid links you see on a Google search. Organizations and businesses, like my client, pay when their advertisements appear whenever you type in specific words, like “fundraising” or “careers.”

The key to AdWords is the right combination of relevance and brevity. You need to describe your product or service in very succinct, yet attractive terms within the context of AdWords’ rules — such as no repeating words and no “all caps.”

So you probably see where I’m going with this … can you describe yourself in Google AdWords terms? Can you be succinct, yet attract enough interest for someone to “click through” and look for more information about you (such as asking you to tell them more about yourself)?

Don’t think that because it’s terse, it’s easy. Like writing children’s books, writing AdWords or describing yourself in terms that are easy to understand but short and direct is a very difficult task.

So your career action step this week? Next time you do a Google search, look to the right column on the page and ask yourself, if I were to advertise there, what would I say?