Search. Click. Find.

There are many reasons why businesses outsource the management of paid search, but for small businesses with small budgets, the tools are there to create and launch a Google campaign within minutes (well, okay, I advise against launching a campaign in minutes - but you can easily launch something in a day or two).

At its root, Adwords is a self-serve application. Sure, there are a lot of moving parts, but that shouldn't stop you from diving right in.

Adwords provides some powerful free tools to facilitate to the process of launching a campaign.

Here are my top three favorites:

The Adwords Keyword Tool is a great keyword-building resource provided for the low-low price of FREE.

The Google Adwords Traffic Estimator (also free) lets you forecast estimated clicks and cost for a selection keywords using a selection of variables (e.g., maximum bid, geographic location and match type).

Google Trends is another interesting tool that Google reps like to use when submitting presentations to prospective advertisers. The tool gives you an instant sense for the seasonality of a term or group of terms across multiple years (assuming there's enough search volume). It ties peaks in traffic to news events and is a great way to hone in on organic terms worth targeting and expand a paid keyword list (particularly since the news articles contain a wealth of relevant keywords.