BENEFIT #3: COST

Banner advertising can cost $25 for 1,000 impressions of an advertisement regardless of number of real website visits those impressions deliver. Top news portals can charge even twice that. PPC search ads cost nothing until an interested individual actually clicks through to your website. Even with competitive bidding process that pits you against other advertisers for top spots at most PPC search engines, costs per click can still be just pennies. If you work out average cost to acquire a new visitor from other mediums, it'll likely end up higher than search engine ad without benefits of precise targeting and pre-qualifying visit with ad text.

It becomes clear why pay-per-click advertising should be foundation of an online advertising plan when you consider combined benefits of targeting, costs and reach of medium:

* There's no guessing how many visitors will result from an advertising spend. Since you set your own click price, you know how many visitors each dollar buys in advance.

* Conversion rates and ROI are easy to calculate.

* Visitors are pre-qualified before arriving at your website by your ad text.

* Ads are placed without long-term commitments or high up-front fees.

* PPC search advertising reaches so many internet users that almost any niche audience can be targeted.

* Ad text can be changed at any time.

PPC search advertising is targeted, affordable and abundantly available. It should be exploited in full, at many available companies, before spending money elsewhere as almost any other medium will be less targeted, less controllable and more expensive.

It should not, decidedly not, be talking about something entirely different from what is contained in headline – as a lot of so-called copywriters tend to do. This merely diverts your prospect’s attention from your major proposition. Always remember that reason he is bothering to read your body copy is because he has been intrigued by your headline. He wants to be sure he has understood message.

All right, with opening para written, rest should write itself. Your second para should talk about features of product. How it works. What it does. How fast it operates – that kind of thing. And if it has a lot of features, expand your writing into a third and fourth paragraphs if necessary.

This done, your penultimate para should refer back to headline – once again reiterating benefit. After that, all you need is a call-to-action paragraph; one that describes where, how and when product can be bought.

And that, in a nutshell, is how to construct body copy. The formula, however, is not set in stone. Just so long as your first paragraph is always a re-work of headline message, you can do more or less as you wish with rest of it.

Simple – isn’t it?

Patrick Quinn is an award winning copywriter with 40 years' experience of advertising business in London, Miami, Dublin and Edinburgh. He publishes a FREE monthly newsletter, AdBriefing. Subscriptions are available at: http://www.adbriefing.com