Establishing a successful Google Adwords campaign can be tough for both beginners and experts alike. Tougher still if you are entering a new niche or just starting to operate in an unfamiliar market. You can always spend a lot of time on market research and spying on your competitor but you will only advance once you create an ad and concentrate on optimizing it. Then again, just placing an ad out there won’t instantly lead to success. The truth is a lot of people discover how quickly they can lose all their time, effort and money invested in Adwords by committing simple mistakes.

These costly mistakes are addressed in the book The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords. Written by Perry Marshall, the book is all about getting excellent results from Adwords campaigns consistently.

Below are five common mistakes you must avoid to get you started in raking in huge traffic from your target market:

1. Writing keyword-less ads. By this I mean writing keywords only in the headline of your ad. Posting 1-2 keywords or keyphrases in the body of your ad will make it more relevant in the eyes of both your target market and Google.

2. Directing all traffic to your homepage. Don’t ever send your visitors to your homepage when they click your ads. In most cases, a homepage is used to give general information about a company and its products or services. Those who click on ads do so for a specific reason. Give them what they’ve came for by directing them to a landing page listing your value proposition for them.

3. Using ‘broad match’ in the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool as the basis of your research and campaign. As the name suggests, the ‘broad match’ selection is only useful for an overview of your chosen niche or market. The whole point of keyword research is to know the precise words or phrases your target market uses when searching for information in Google. Make use of ‘phrase match’ and ‘exact match’ instead to find out the exact keywords or keyphrases that will lure in your prospects.

4. Use of low-performing keywords. Discovering the exact keywords your target market use takes time. Monitor your Adwords campaign regularly to check if your keywords are performing as expected. If they’re not, look for other keywords to focus on. The Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool has a ’synonym’ feature you can use to produce new keywords and make the most out of your campaigns.

5. Stating your offer solely on the body of your ad. The first thing people see on ads are headlines. Having a solid headline will determine if the person viewing your ad will read on and click it or just ignore your ad and move on. It is critical to state the one benefit that can change lives in your headline. But do not forget entirely about your ad’s body as people don’t just ignore these 3 to 4 lines of text. Capture them with an attention grabbing headline and follow up with a well composed body.

There are websites that provide questions and answers for a huge range of topics. This is a gold mine of information just waiting to be tapped.

A user on one of these Question and Answer web sites can ask a “question” on a particular subject and other users of the site can put forward answers to it and the answers can be voted on (and then sorted by) relevance (more votes meaning more relevance). All of the responses can be seen online.

These Question and Answer web sites can generate you great amounts of traffic if you can answer questions in your area of expertise (it goes without saying that you need to ensure that your answering Questions that are related to your particular niche on the Internet).

Yahoo have a Question and Answer website that offers a complete question and answer service and it’s very helpful to use to get your name out there and known to people.

You do certainly need to be careful about what you post. Don’t expect to be able to just post a URL and get masses of traffic, you will find your “answer” voted down or even removed if you do this.

As I have mentioned a number times, providing relevant content and great quality will be far more valuable. Actually helping people out (by answering their question) will show you to be an “expert” in your market in no time flat.

The rules generally specify no “soliciting”, so answer the question and help someone out, with a detailed answer and then add a reference to your website for people to follow up for more information.

The other great reason to use Question and Answer sites (particularly Yahoo given that Google is not accepting new questions and answers) is that lots of websites syndicate the questions and answers for content on their website.

Because of this an increase in web site traffic happens.

As I mentioned before, Questions and Answers can also appear in search engine results. Of course the other benefit is that users of the question and answer sites themselves will get to your website from reading your responses.

Personally in my experience I treat the answering of questions as building up a presence on the Internet rather than a source of huge traffic to my websites, however it is certainly something that should not be ignored.

With that said, I believe it can be a great “return on investment” where for a relatively small investment of time (to answer questions) you can get a steady stream of traffic to your web site.