Just a quick question really. As you can imagine being in the marketing department I get loads and loads of sales calls. Some calls try to sell me the most random things you can ever imagine (the best was a man trying to sell me a company jingle) and others are much more useful and dare I say, even interesting.

Recently I've had alot of calls regarding paid listings in online directories like yell.com etc. I was wondering if anyone has tried using Google Adwords instead and were the results as good? I kinda get that directories do all the optimising hard work for you but they are really expensive for what you get. Is Adwords worth the effort in other words, I've got loads on at the momment and having to manage an Adwords account just seems like a time consuming exercise.

Has anyone had any experience of this and what are your thoughts?

I just started it and I did one on facebook as well...I will let you know how it goes...I am trying to get my website to or near the top of the search engines

Google Adwords is definitely worth the effort, but only if you know what you're doing. Often it's best to hire an Internet Marketing agency to manage the ads for you. Although this brings added costs, it saves you massive amounts of time. We're currently trying Adwords for our cleaning service (http://www.chemdryclean.co.uk/ofliverpool) at the moment, seems to be working so far! Will let you know the outcome.

The best way is obviously to be ranking in the organic search results when people search for a cleaner in your local area. This is free and will usually get you more clicks than Adwords ads (which are not free).

But doing SEO (optimizing it for the search engines) on your site can be time consuming, considering that you will have to research how to do it and then implement what you have learned.

For this reason Adwords is the better bet (and a better option over paid directory listings I would say).

Adwords also has a learning curve if you want to set up campaigns that will bring you targeted results without wasting money (by accidentally running ads in India or something like that). I recommend Perry Marshalls 'Ultimate Guide to Adwords' for learning about how to do Adwords correctly.

I'm trying to figure out SEO (Search Engine Optimization) now and let me tell you it is an art. It's also expensive if you have someone else do it for you.

A lot of website templates come SEO optimized already then you can tweak the website layout to your liking. There's alot of information out there about Adwords on the web for free. It just takes time to learn about it. Like anything else I guess.

Success of Google Adwords depends on business and how early you result wanted in search engine.

Adwords is probably the best way to market your business online right now. Paid directories never get the same levels of qualified traffic, and SEO is a crap shoot. Adwords gives you guaranteed placement on terms (almost, if your willing to pay!) and you can track conversion performance directly, so you always know your ROI.

Def. have someone with experience give you a hand starting it up, but you can probably manage yourself with an hour/day time investment once the ads are up and running.