So many online entrepreneurs search high and low for an effective, affordable online advertising tool. They may spend loads of time and money on website development, search engine optimization, email marketing, ezine and classified advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns and other forms of paid advertising. These online advertising tools may generate vast amounts of traffic, but if the website visitors aren't converted to buyers, all of the time and money spent getting them there is wasted.

Thus, website operators simply must give adequate attention to the one online advertising tool that will transform targeted prospects into paying customers. Conversion rates are vital to the success of a website. The one and only online advertising tool that will do that is your sales copy.

By tracking your website performance using conversion rates (the percentage of buyers vs. the total number of visitors) will clue you in as to whether or not your sales copy is doing its job as an online advertising tool. If your conversion rate isn't pretty good, chances are that your sales strategy, and relatively your sales copy, needs to be improved.

Other factors that can cause inadequate conversion rates are the speed at which your website loads and broken links. People are impatient and they won't usually wait too long for a site to load up and if they click on links that go nowhere, they will likely leave the site without a second thought. If these factors are not issues for your website, your sales copy is probably the culprit, the online advertising tool that isn't doing its job.

The biggest mistake website operators make that causes sales copy to be ineffective as an online advertising tool is using traditional, brick and mortar advertising techniques in developing their sales copy. Traditional advertisements, like direct mail, radio ads, or newspaper advertisements are designed to get shoppers into a retail store. From there, a salesperson takes up the selling process and closes the sales.

On the internet, your advertising through search engines, directories, email and other sources takes care of getting the visitors to your website, your "retail store" on the web. Once they get there, they don't meet a salesperson like they do in a brick and mortar store. Your sales copy IS your salesperson. So, in practice, the sales copy isn't an online advertising tool at all. Rather, it becomes an online sales tool.

The part of your copywriting that acts as an online advertising tool for the purpose of driving traffic to your site includes the copy for your actual advertisements and your website page titles and descriptions. The rest of your copywriting should be sales oriented. Without your website copy acting as a sales tool, your use of the best online advertising tools on the net to attract traffic to your website will be fruitless.

There are two basic types of sales copy that can be used to establish your credibility and to convey your unique selling proposition. The most effective is long sales copy that takes your website visitors through the entire selling process, just like a salesperson would, from product or service introduction to conveying benefits, establishing credibility, countering objections and closing the sale. Short sales copy may be practical if you have a catalog-style website, but as an online selling tool, it just doesn't usually do the trick.

The secret to success in the online marketplace is to use an online advertising tool to get visitors to your site and then to dazzle them with results-oriented sales copy that will close the sale. Your sales copy is much more than advertising. Without effective sales copy, no online advertising tool will achieve the results you desire for a profitable online business.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope, fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing advice you're getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing, or a website owner who wants to make more money from your website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your internet business at http://BiznessTips.com