Getting traffic to your website is one part of the battle. The bigger battle, however, is to make that traffic count.
You should make your website 'sticky' so that the visitor stays on your website for a sufficient time and 'bites' the message you are trying to reach.

The typical Internet visitor is a person in a hurry who is overfed with information and doesn't want to spend too much time UNLESS the information appeals to him. Typical staying time of a visitor ranges from 5 seconds to 4 minutes depending on the interest and length of copy.

5 seconds!! Hmm… quite a tall order to get someone to stick on with that kind of attention span. That is why Internet copywriting is a different ball game altogether.

The aim is to catch the attention of the visitor at the first instant and then keep him there while gradually building up the climax. Let us examine some of the desirable perquisites of marketing copy for the Internet:

1. Make your style conversational

A lot of copywriters are stuck in the "perfection" mode. This, in fact, is the biggest disqualification on the Web. The average web visitor is a person who wants to be "spoken" to instead of reading boring literary stuff. So, speak to him through your copy. The more you relate to him in his lingo, the more the chance that he will lap up your message.

It is important though that you do not make grammatical mistakes or have typos because these end up showing you as unprofessional and careless.

2. Write copy that sells your marketing message

Your visitor really does not have time or the inclination to read more than a page of what you write. It is on that page that you must capture his imagination and be able to sell what you are wanting.

Therefore, your marketing copy has to be a sales copy. It must showcase a proposition and then invite the visitor for taking action.

In general, the components of an effective sales copy would include:

• Grabbing Attention: Catching attention through very effective headlines and titles written in boldface. Almost 80% of the visitors leave a page because they don't know what the page is trying to say at the first instance. Your headline should be crisp and summarize the message of your copy in a single line.
  

• Creating an Interest: Once you have crossed the first hurdle, your copy should next try to create an interest in the visitor for what your message is trying to convey.
   

• Creating the desire: The interest should gradually build up into a genuine desire for your product. This is a challenging part - to sustain and build up the interest into a burning desire for your product.
   

• Climaxing into Action: All this build up is fruitless if the action that you seek from your visitor is not done. Therefore, you must specifically call for action through your copy and provide him an opportunity to act. For example, if you are writing a copy to sell a product, you must provide an 'order' button from where a visitor can instantly act upon your copy.
  Although this would seem natural, you will be surprised how many websites actually don't have a clearly visible ordering option.

These, then are the basic ingredients of effective Internet copywriting which will form the building blocks for your efforts.

Of course, nothing beats experience and Internet copywriters don't come cheap. Single page copies are known to have generated 1000s of dollars of revenue - heck! A single copy of ours generates revenues in the high hundreds every SINGLE day of the year. So it really isn't too bad hiring a good copywriter either. But for those wishing to learn and grow, this will provide a suitable roadmap.