So many online entrepreneurs search high and low for aneffective, affordable online advertising tool. They may spendloads of time and money on website development, search engineoptimization, email marketing, ezine and classifiedadvertisements, viral marketing campaigns, pay-per-clickcampaigns and other forms of paid advertising. These onlineadvertising tools may generate vast amounts of traffic, but ifthe website visitors aren't converted to buyers, all of the timeand money spent getting them there is wasted.

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

By tracking your website performance using conversion rates (thepercentage of buyers vs. the total number of visitors) will clueyou in as to whether or not your sales copy is doing its job asan online advertising tool. If your conversion rate isn't prettygood, chances are that your sales strategy, and relatively yoursales 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 copyto be ineffective as an online advertising tool is usingtraditional, brick and mortar advertising techniques indeveloping their sales copy. Traditional advertisements, likedirect mail, radio ads, or newspaper advertisements are designedto get shoppers into a retail store. From there, a salespersontakes 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 thevisitors to your website, your retail store on the web. Oncethey get there, they don't meet a salesperson like they do in abrick and mortar store. Your sales copy IS your salesperson. So,in practice, the sales copy isn't an online advertising tool atall. Rather, it becomes an online sales tool.

The part of your copywriting that acts as an online advertisingtool for the purpose of driving traffic to your site includes thecopy for your actual advertisements and your website page titlesand descriptions. The rest of your copywriting should be salesoriented. Without your website copy acting as a sales tool, youruse of the best online advertising tools on the net to attracttraffic 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 takesyour website visitors through the entire selling process, justlike a salesperson would, from product or service introduction toconveying benefits, establishing credibility, counteringobjections and closing the sale. Short sales copy may bepractical if you have a catalog-style website, but as an onlineselling tool, it just doesn't usually do the trick.

The secret to success in the online marketplace is to use anonline advertising tool to get visitors to your site and then todazzle them with results-oriented sales copy that will close thesale. Your sales copy is much more than advertising. Withouteffective sales copy, no online advertising tool will achieve theresults you desire for a profitable online business.