Internet marketing is doing things that generate sales and/or capture leads from potential customers that are surfing the Internet .
This means getting your website to rank in Google, Yahoo MSN, article directories, blog directories, RSS Feeds, Social Networks, and other search related sites so that it shows up when a prospective buyer of yours types in a “keyword phrase” that relates to your website.
This is something of a mysterious art these days and is an art that is always evolving as the search engines evolve. As time marches on there is a much greater need to enlist specialists and consultants that work only in this arena, in order for website owners to be able to get their websites on the first page of Google’s search engine results for the keywords that everyone thinks will generate sales and leads. This service is called SEO or search engine optimization. Another way for companies to get the same results is to arrange for their staff to participate in focused training seminars, or one on one training, to gain the necessary skill sets to do this work in-house
Internet marketing has grown to include pay per click advertising. Ads that are placed within the results pages of search engines (when you do a search, they show up on the right hand side of the page) that are written by advertisers to be triggered when certain keywords or phrases are searched. Each time a person clicks on the ad, they are sent to the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”. This is how Google makes most of its income.
The future of Internet marketing will be the social networking sites like Facebook. Here, the best way to advertise will be “viral” and more “virtual word of mouth”. This is much more complex than search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, but has the potential to be much more lucrative!
There are many companies that specialise in assisting company’s in their Internet Marketing efforts.