Internet Marketing, also known as Online Marketing, Online Advertising or Internet Advertising, is the promotion of products and services over the Internet. Internet Marketing, in fact, aims to create a better business opportunity for an organization by promoting its products or services using online media; hence, businesses – both online and off line – are increasingly making use of Internet Advertising as part of their marketing strategy.

Initially, Internet Marketing was all about building a website or putting up banner/display ads on other websites. A website with appropriate text-content, image-inclusions and audio/video features is indeed an excellent option of reaching out to global audience and informing them about a company’s products/services, their features, et al. The website remains the basic building block of Internet Marketing even today; however, it is now being blended with key web site promotion techniques in order to achieve the advertising goals.

Internet Marketing – Key Techniques

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the process of marketing or advertising a website via search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Two totally different approaches are followed for Search Engine Marketing – Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-click Advertising.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a web site promotion technique that improves the site’s organic ranking in searches based on select keywords/phrases and attracts more web traffic. If you have an Internet Business, SEO is something you cannot simply do without.

Pay-per-click or PPC Advertising which appear as links next to the organic results on search engine results’ pages involves listing a website by bidding on keywords. PPC calls for methodical keyword selection/optimization so that the keywords match with the search terms used by target segment of users and capably increase web site traffic.

Pay-for-inclusion (PFI) listing in website directories is another popular SEM technique.

Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the method of conveying information about a product or service through email. After the initial glitch (on account of spamming), email marketing has been effectively used for web site promotion. These days, of course, it is permission-based email marketing that is being practiced and internet businesses are using the opt-in lists, giving the customers the right to refuse further communication.

Mass mailing and e-commerce newsletters are two popular e-mail marketing tools.